Take the bold, dynamic, careful editing of vintage poster design and combine it with modern imagery like Star Wars and Army of Darkness, and what do you get? Tom Whalen’s “Strong Stuff”, a collection of incredibly fun and engaging posters that are a little bit geek art, a little bit Saul Bass.
Whalen’s interest in comics dates back to his childhood in a small town in Pennsylvania, where he spent many afternoons thumbing through comics in his grandmother’s candy shop. Inspired to draw every comic book character he could think of, Whalen eventually went on to art school and is known today for his signature “left-facing sideways profile style.”
“I love vector because of the flexibility in workflow that it affords,” Whalen said in an interview with vector.tutsplus.com.
“I am constantly tweaking composition and color and I think I’d drive myself utterly crazy if I were working in traditional media. I find myself thinking in Illustrator nowadays, meaning I can get away with doing a very loose sketch (if time constraints dictate) and flesh out most of the job once on the computer.”
So where does Whalen go from here? “I guess if I could daydream a little, I’ve always really wanted to do comic book cover work and create official movie posters for films,” he muses. See his full gallery of work at strongstuff.deviantart.com.
