A film I have a complicated relationship with, but made for a really interesting Rewind Movie Podcast episode. I wanted to utilise the very overused, well-known image of Andrew “Large” Largeman sinking into the background as he tries on a shirt made from the same material as the recently renovated bathroom in his childhood home from which he has become so alienated (why was there leftover fabric from a bathroom wall that could be used to make a man’s shirt? I do not know!), but give it a bit more thematic weight.

I sourced the closest analogue I could find of the wallpaper pattern, a William Morris (proud son of Walthamstow!) design called Acanthus. I could only find a small square, so I had to line it up by eye and create a repeatable pattern big enough to fill a Photoshop square. I then eyeballed a purple and green colour-scheme based partly on the screenshots I could source from the movie, and partly one that I thought seemed attractive – aware that I was going to potentially tweak this heavily later.

I used a faux-vectoring technique (I no longer have Illustrator, so have to create a workaround using a YouTube video from TextureLabs that is intended to mimic screenprinting) to create a three colour Braff face, that I matched to the colours in the wallpaper pattern. I manually erased some of his face to allow tendrils of the background plants to show through on his face.

Then, I didn’t like the cartoony boldness – so I ran it through a Studio 2am effect called Indie Dreams, which seemed appropriate in capturing a hazy, early-’00s sensitive colour pallete. There were a number of options, so I used one that shifted more towards a colder green/purple tone. It helped to remove some of the lazy pixellation I’d left in my haste to construct the wallpaper pattern. Finally, I grabbed a font that seemed to match a less familiar release poster I’d found, a blocky serif font called Flamente Cairo. I stuck to the late-Gen-X penchant for all lower case text, and added the same festival laurels that the poster I sourced proclaimed. It felt, again, true to 2004 to trumpet the cachet that came with festival slots in the dog days of the Peak Sundance era.

Prints are available here at Teemill.