Film Poster - Improving My Vectors

This morning I've been trying again to improve the vectors for my poster. I'd previously had no success in trying to improve them digitally, so I tried improving them manually.

I started by drawing each character again using a variety of styles. I used black pen because I wanted to try and re-create roughly how it'd look when it was printed, and to further this I drew them at the same scale as they would've been when screen printed. The problem that arose from this were that the only black pens I had were either fineliners or sharpies, which meant either the lines were too thin to realistically attempt screen printing or were too thick to provide real detail. On top of this, I had massive problems fitting the pen lines on top of the existing vector because I'd drawn them independently of each other.

Also, the large amount of black in the hair lessened the impact the glasses had on the poster, which is something I desperately wanted to avoid. Because of this I decided to try another method.

I drew on top of the print-out I'd used for the crit, but I used a red pen instead, purely because it was of a thickness in between that of a sharpie and a fineliner. This way I hoped to get more detail without the lines being too fine, whilst at the same time I knew the detail would match the original vectors because they'd been used as a base.

But even then I wasn't happy with the results that produced.

So I decided to go back to using a digital method to improve my vectors, and just put highlights on myself, as this way I could control the thickness myself, the results of which are below.

I'm unsure on if I like this sort of style yet or not. I think it looks quite over-developed by itself, but it gives me a lot more room to play with layout and composition, as using this sort of style will allow my to overlay the characters hair without them looking like they've merged, as the highlight breaks up the block colours. Using white instead of black also stops the black of the glasses from loosing their impact. On top of this it would make the screen printing process simpler as well. I'll make my decision of weather to use them or not based on composition, which is going to be the next stage of my development.