Los Chavos: Band Shoot

I had the pleasure of shooting 9-piece Latin/SKA band Los Chavos recently. Here is a selection of pictures from that shoot. They like their 'Day of the Dead' gear ... can you tell? ;-)

Incidentally, this is the band that inspired the production of this stuff.

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6 lads on a shopping trolley ... what could possibly go wrong?
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6 lads on a shopping trolley ... what could possibly go wrong?
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6 lads on a shopping trolley ... what could possibly go wrong?
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6 lads on a shopping trolley ... what could possibly go wrong?

 

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6 lads on a shopping trolley ... what could possibly go wrong?
6 lads on a shopping trolley ... what could possibly go wrong?
6 lads on a shopping trolley ... what could possibly go wrong?

A quick post today ... things are busy here at Chez Geoff. I'm doing some art documentation for an artist ... more on that soon :-)


Gone all Pop! The poster for Los Chavos

I did a shoot for 9-piece Latin band 'Los Chavos' a couple of weeks ago and have been busy processing them up. One of the parts of the commission (the kinda optional part) was to produce a poster for the band in the style Pop Art Cartoon by taking headshots of the band and reducing them effectively to solid colour paintings. I'd not tried it before but I knew it was possible so I agreed. I'd shot the headshots using the intense blue of our autumnal skies to make it easier to mask out later and replace it with whatever colour I chose.

When I first approached the task I thought 'It'll be easiest just to paint these in Photoshop using the original photo as a base.'. But then I'm not the greatest illustrator in the world and in effect I was afraid they wouldn't look any good (I'm sure I'm not alone on that front) so I went for what I thought was the safest option ... trialling and recording a series of actions incorporating various filters in Photoshop. The two main filters were 'Poster Edges' and 'Cutout' which I chose for their ability to effectively reduce the number of colours and tones I wanted in my final image. OK so after a couple of testy tweaky runs I passed all nine of the images through the action ... and? Well, the results weren't great, at least for most of the images. One worked really well, two others were alright and the remaining six were rubbish. I re-tweaked the processing and got a slightly better result: three out of the nine were now pretty close to where I wanted them to be ... that only left six (the same six as before!) still looking rubbish.

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Hmmm ... there was always the painting option... so I began to paint. Not from scratch but using an intermediary layer created during the processing action. Using my editing tablet, I selected a hard brush, sampled colours as I went and well, painted! I was soon pretty caught up in the process and while each picture took a while (about 30 minutes each I guess) I was pretty bloody satisfied with the result. 

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When I arranged all nine into the poster and coloured them up yellow, blue or red ... I literally said 'wow!'. I should note that I'm easily impressed with my own cleverness ;-)

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The members of Los Chavos love it (and all the other non-painty ones which I'll post soon) so I think I've found another artform ... who'd a thunk it?