WEBEXPEDITION18 Never Stop The Exploring

Combine stock photos, triangle shapes and textures to create an awesome retro poster that takes inspiration from climbing expedition to Annapurna in 1970. By mixing up simple shapes with old and grungey textures we’ll create a retro poster design for “Annapurna 1970″.
Let’s not waste any more time and get started!

Tutorial Outcome

This is what we will be designing.

Research and Inspiration

From wikipedia: Annapurna (Goddess of the Harvests) is a series of peaks in the Himalayas, a 55 km (34 mi)-long massif of which the highest point, Annapurna I, stands at 8091m, making it the 10th-highest summit in the world and one of the 14 “eight-thousanders”. Annapurna I was the first 8,000-metre (26,200 ft) peak to be climbed.
The south face of Annapurna was first climbed in 1970 by Don Whillans and Dougal Haston, members of a British expedition led by Chris Bonington.

I knew from the start what style of poster I wanted to create, but to further develop my ideas I did web research in order to pick up more ideas and inspiration which would help tailor my design.

Setting Up The Document

Open up Adobe Photoshop and create a document with desired poster dimensions. Remember to use a high DPI (150-300) and CMYK Color Mode if you are planning on sending the file to press.

Step 1: The Background

Fill the background with white color (#ffffff) using Paint Bucket Tool.

Create new layer, set the Foreground color to #99dbfb and Background color to #b4e4fb. With Gradient Tool (G) fill the new layer using gradient from Foreground to Background.

Duplicate this layer by pressing Command + J on keyboard and then change the Blend Mode of duplicated layer to Multiply and lower the opacity to 50%.

Reset the Foreground and Background colors to Black and White by pressing D on keyboard. Create new layer, then go to Filter -> Render -> Clouds.

Change the Blend Mode to Screen and lower the opacity to 50%. Background is all set up.

To avoid mess, select all layers, except first white color layer, and press Command + G to group them, and name this group “Background”.

Step 2: Creating First Peak – The Highest One

Pick up Custom Shape Tool (U), from Shape menu choose triangle, set color to #3383a8, draw the highest peak and place it in the middle of the page. Name this layer “highest peak”.

Command + Click on Vector Mask Thumbnail to make a selection.

Create new layer and use Polygonal Lasso Tool (L) to create selection like on the picture below. Make sure that Intersect with selection is selected.

Fill the selection with #316378 color. Give this layer a name – “shadow”.

Now let’s create snow on the top of the mountain.

Once again, Command + Click on Vector Mask Thumbnail of “highest peak” layer to make a selection, then with Plygonal Lasso Tool (L) create selection on top, create new layer and fill selection with white color. Name this layer “snow”.

Final touch – add subtle shadow on snow. Command + Click on “shadow” layer to make a selection, with Polygonal Lasso Tool (L) create new selection, again create new layer and fill selection with light gray color #dce8ea. Give this layer name “snow shadow”.

Here is how our highest peak look now. Not bad huh?

Once again to avoid mess, select all peak layers (highest peak, shadow, snow, snow shadow) and group them into “Highest Peak” group.

Step 3: Create Next Peak

Our poster design is going to be made up of mountain peaks, and therefore we’re going to need a lot of them. Let’s add another peak to poster.

Using techiques described in Step 2 we will create next peak, but with different colors for peak and shadow. To make your work little bit easier hide “Highest Peak” group before start drawing new peak.

I used #5ca9cb color for the peak, #396f86 for the shadow, white for the snow and once again #dce8ea for snow shadow.
Again group all this layers and give it appropriate name.

Step 4: Create Even More Peaks

We now need to create more peaks. Repeat the above steps until you are happy with composition. Use different shades of blue for peaks and shadows,

keep adding …

and play with order of peaks.

At the end you should have something similar to this.

It’s time to move on.

Step 5: Smallest Peak And Climber

With Custom Shape Tool (U) create small triangle filled with #2f799b color and position it like shown below.

Create tiny shadow on this peak (I used #336c83 for the color).

Jump over to Shutterstock and download Silhouette of a mountaineer standing on the top at sunset image.

Open up the shot in a new document and clip out the mountaineer with the Pen Tool.

Paste the silhouette into the document and scale into place. Position it in the bottom right corner, so it looks like the mountaineer stands on the smallest peak. Name this layer “climber”.

Open Layer Style for this layer, open Color Overlay and set color to #2f799b (the same color that we used for smallest peak.)

Step 6: Typography

Go ahead to The League Of Moveable Type and download League Gothic font, which fits perfectly into our design.
Grab Horizontal Type Tool (T), choose League Gothic font and type the word “ANNAPURNA”. Use the following settings and place it like shown below.

With the same font type “1970″, use following settings and place it close to word “ANNAPURNA”.

Take a look at result so far.

Step 7: Making Borders With Layer Mask

This step is going to be very easy. Select all groups (background, peaks, climber …) and group them into one big group.
Using Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) make selection smaller then canvas.

With big group selected, go to Layer -> Layer Mask -> Reveal Selection.

Step 8: Adding Texture

Pick wrinkled paper backdrop texture from Shutterstock, and insert it at the top of your layers palette.
Scale it down to fit our document and desaturate (Shift + Command + U). Run a quick Sharpen (Filter -> Sharpen) command to give more definition to the texture.

Change the Blending Mode to Multiply and lower the Opacity to 60%.

Conclusion

All done! We now have a quite awesome retro poster, made entirely out of basic shapes (triangles), simple blending techniques and spiced up with some textures.
Take a look at the final result below.

I hope You enjoy reading this tutorial. Thanks for reading!

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Authored by Nikola Lazarevic

Web Designer, Blogger, M.Sc in Electronic Engineering from Nis, Serbia. Founder of webexpedition18.com. You can find me on Twitter.