Simmons Flyer

Matthew Simmons (the world’s leading expert on peak oil) will be speaking on the peak oil dilemma at UNH on April 4. NEK asked me to make a flyer. I wanted to keep it very simple since it’s only page-sized and I wanted it to be eye-catching.

 

I found a great image of an oil derrick on a snowfield at istockphoto (last time I use my personal account to buy images for CRRC). NEK liked it but said it should have a drilling platform. So I found a good but uncredited image of a platform on-line. NEK like it but wanted there to be ice. I gave up at that point but Kathy found an image for me. A teeny tiny web image (read: 72 dpi). I stretched it as much as I could and spent a lot of time cleaning it up. Not great but passable for what it is.

In each case, I placed the image at the bottom of the canvas. On the first 2, I was able to make a gradient on a seperate layer using colors sucked up from the image. Using some judicious blurring and erasing and a seperate layer of paint at low opacity, I blended the images and the gradient layers pretty well. Don’t judge by these images…I sharpened them after I shrunk them.  They printed very nicely.

On the final flyer, the sky was a mess so I ended up erasing all of it and made a circle gradient which I stretched and placed behind the platform layer. I had to get in pretty close to the platform to clean it up but I think it’s not too bad. Also, there is an additional gradient layer (linear) in the very back to give color and depth to the sky. The circle gradient is light grey to transparent, the linear gradient is blue to transparent and the background is blue.