DANIEL RUBINSTEIN

Went to Megacon this weekend. Now I'm a happy little cartoonist!

This year, I'm going to try to make sure that I draw something every day. Whether it's a goofy cartoon or a sketch from life, I need to keep my hand moving, especially as the rest of my life gets busier.

Peruse my website or have the briefest conversation with me and you'll quickly learn that I am a obsessed with movies. Big films, small films, old films, new films, blockbusters and cult classics - I just can't get enough. So, naturally, as an illustrator and a film junkie, I've always had a soft spot for film poster design. Sure, the glory days are behind us and we've been forced to accept giant floating heads, over-used trends and horrible, horrible photoshopping as the norm, but a few gems still manage to slip through every year. Now that we're almost a week into 2012, I thought it'd be fun to go back and find ten of my favorites from 2011.

CAPTAIN AMERICA

It may not be the most creative or original, but the beautifully desaturated colors and simple composition make for one of the better blockbuster posters to come along in a while. Even the standard-issue dirt and gritty Photoshop layers seem to work with this image.

DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK

Film posters are dominated by photography these days, so when this beautifully drawn teaser for the Guillermo del Toro produced Don't Be Afraid of the Dark came out, it was like a breath of fresh air. It isn't too much of a surprise. Del Toro has used hand drawn artwork as teasers for many of his past films. Check out the great Mignola work for the Hellboy films and Pan's Labyrinth, and a poster by the legendary Drew Struzan for the first Hellboy.

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 2

I'll be honest, the bulk of the Harry Potter posters have bored the beejesus out of me. Usually they consisted entirely of closeups of the characters with sparks, snow, dirt or whatever other trendy layers they could put across it. I never understood how they could come up with such boring posters from a series of films bursting at the seams with imagination and great visuals. For the most part, The Deathly Hallows was no exception but for some reason, this one worked for me. In spite of all the sparks and fire and ashes, there's something about the look of exhaustion on Radcliffe's face, the two wands in his hands and the tagline that really comes together. This one really does look like Harry is at the end of his journey.

THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE

The image perfectly captures the decadence, brutality and ego of its main character (or rather, the horrific man that the main character is forced to double for). A very daring and creative poster.

WE BOUGHT A ZOO

We Bought a Zoo was a cute movie that delivered exactly what you expected. It was light-weight, charming and occasionally moving and this poster captures the vibe well. A nice, simple, well-executed piece of artwork.

THE IDES OF MARCH

This is how you use Photoshop effectively for a movie poster. Sure, it's not perfect. There's something wonky about that hand and the shadows look a little too brushed on, but the concept is fantastic and it works so well that you can forgive the flaws.

WINNIE THE POOH

Disney did the right thing when they brought Winnie the Pooh back this year. They didn't make it a big reinvention, they didn't feel the need to stuff it with extra padding and story and characters. They didn't even give it a fancy title (it's simply "Winnie the Pooh"). They let the characters do what they've always done, simply and wonderfully. This poster doesn't even need a title to tell us what the film is all about and the use of empty space makes it stand out from others at the theater. It's one of the best Disney posters to come out in a while.

J. EDGAR

Looking at this poster, it almost feels like the studio must have requested yet another Shepard Fairey rip-off and the designer managed to come up with something that taps into that trend, while also looking old-fashioned and more unique at the same time. Perhaps the studio wasn't so pleased, because this design seemed to get far less use than the dull photographic version of the same image, but I think it's still striking.

RED STATE

I wish Kevin Smith's experimental venture into socially-conscious horror had been as effective and unsettling as this teaser poster promised. Dubbed "the Holy Ghost", there's something about this image that just sends a slow chill down my spine.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - GHOST PROTOCOL

I have never seen this poster in a theater but I've seen it online and I just love it. The blending of the burning fuse and the Burj Khalifa (the setting for one of the film's biggest set pieces) is superb and subtle. I wish most blockbuster movies had clever posters like this.

SHERLOCK HOLMES - A GAME OF SHADOWS

Last fall, Wadjet Eye Games released the fourth entry of their flagship series of adventure games - The Blackwell Deception. It was a big moment for me because it was the first time my artwork appeared in an adventure game! When Dave Gilbert, the game's creator, asked me to do the character portraits, I jumped at the chance. I had already become a fan of the series through the previous three games and I didn't want to miss an opportunity to work on characters that existed in the same game genre as my beloved George Stobbart, Gabriel Knight and Guybrush Threepwood!

However, working on pre-established characters can be a bit tricky. This is Joey Mallone. He's one of the two main characters from the Blackwell series (and also a ghost, but you'll have to play the games yourself to get the skinny on that). As you can see, his look has been well established, but the details vary wildly from game to game and across different media. My first job was to determine just what Joey looked like.

The first place I went for inspiration, of course, was in the art of the previous games. I wanted to find a compromise between Joey's lean-and-mean look in the first game and his somewhat bulkier physique in the third. Because Joey died in the 1930s, I also started looking at actors from the 30s and 40s to try to capture the feeling that Joey literally walker (er...floated) out of one era and into another. The final design of Joey is actually inspired quite a bit by Joseph Cotten and especially Gary Cooper.

With that in mind, I went through a few different sketches before finally arriving at one that I liked enough to show Dave. Once the sketch was approved, I brought it into Illustrator and traced my own linework, enhancing details here, cleaning up messy bits there, until I had a nice, clean, crisp design for the character.

From there, it's on to the coloring. In previous games, Joey was colored by a mixture of grays, blues and greens. In the fourth game, the sprite artist designed Joey's character (and all the ghost characters in the game) all in shades of the same color. I wanted to keep the portrait designs consistent with the sprites so I did Joey entirely in shades of blue-green. First, I laid in the base colors, then I added darker shades for the shadows and lighter shades for the highlights to give the character some dimension. Finally, some extra shading and effects and we have a completely colored and finished Joey Mallone portrait ready for adventure.

Of course, that isn't the end of it. Joey - like every other character in The Blackwell Deception - has a whole range of emotions to go through during the course of the game and the whole process had to be re-done for each of his six different expressions.