Boyz N The Hood Poster Illustration

Illustrated components in Procreate, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Colours and assembly in Adobe Photoshop.

Created as part of Gallery 1988's exhibition “30 Years Later” – featuring artwork inspired by the films of 1991.

Boyz N The Hood is one of my favourite movies of all time, so when I was asked to take part in this show I knew immediately which movie I wanted to make art for.

This poster was drawn in 2 primary sections - the characters along the top and my recreation of the famous alleyway scene at the bottom. Above is the full painting for that bottom section. I painted this using shots from the movie as reference, as well as finding the location on Google Maps to line up missing areas - and then some improvisation.

Ricky and the telephone poles were added later, separately.

With the characters they were painted together on a single canvas, first in black and white and then coloured afterwards.

Here are the characters after their main colouring stage. At this point they're close to where I need them to be and can be added to the full composition where I can make adjustments with the full poster in view.

During this poster assembly stage there are a lot of tweaks made to colour grading and highlights in particular. In this piece Lawrence Fishburne's "Furious Styles" character saw the most additional painting from this stage to the final poster. While Ice Cube's "Doughboy" needed less tweaking.