Steve McQueen is considered by many, even to this day, to be the ‘king of cool.’ His legendary persona on the silver screen still captivates fans of all ages today. Though Steve McQueen has long since passed on, his namesake lives on in the form of numerous signature products and events. One notable example is the “Steve McQueen Car Show” – a charity event in Chino Hills, California aimed at helping raise money for the Boys Republic. McQueen was an alumnus of the school and cited it as a big motivation for his success.
We were hired by the McQueen family to create the collateral for the event. Naturally we were quite excited, but digital assets of Steve McQueen we’d likely need aren’t easy to come by these days. This left us puzzled on how to get high resolution imagery to use in such a project. The creative brief was pretty open, so we opted to go with a stylized vector look and texturize it over several natural looking elements.
We found some lower resolution images and used Adobe Illustrator to create tonal based vector art. The work was painstaking to get the desired effect, but the final pieces lent themselves well to increased resolution. They also provided a stark contrast that worked quite well in the overall composition.
The final output was quite complex as you can see in the time lapse video above. We spent considerable time layering several natural elements to give the final art an organic look and feel.
