I knew that I could re-use my initial retro Titanic poster and revisit it easily to make a proper movie poster. Well... 'easily' is perhaps not the best word here. The process was actually much more difficult than expected.
I elected for a nighttime setting with an initial design that involved the iceberg; at some point, the iceberg just didn't work but the night stayed and I had to go through the painful process of lighting the entire ship. This is not historically accurate since the ship was likely not that bright but I really wanted to convey a sense of a fully lit floating palace steaming through the darkness. While the process was long, it still allowed me to learn new techniques in Photoshop and I am quite satisfied with the result. For Titanic aficionados, I still had a no-light policy at the bow, as was the case on ships at night to help the lookouts in their job.
Once the ship was ready, I ended up with an obscene amount of black empty ocean and while this was the case both in the movie and in real-life, it just didn"t work aesthetically. So, you'll all forgive me for using some imaginary smoke/fog and an over-the-top starry sky reflecting in the still mirror-like water (just like this beautiful shot in Pirates of the Caribbean : At World's End !) When I played with colours, I ended up with a lot of interesting versions, more or less coloured, more or less realistic, but all of them beautiful. Ultimately, this one is a compromise between abstract and realistic and it's also the one that doesn't detract too much from the centerpiece which is Titanic herself.
I do not own the rights to the pictures used to create this piece but the ship, I drew myself with as many details as possible.
