the beatitudes
I like to design sermon graphics for my church, Kalos Church. Not only because it's fun, but I get near full control how the series art looks. A true artist's dream if you ask me. Kalos means beautiful in Greek, so whenever I develop series artwork I try to do it in the most beautiful way. However, this project stumped me for months (Thankfully, I had several months heads up before the series started).
How do you market a series that is solely focused on scripture? The Beatitudes is one of Jesus' most famous sermons with a wide range of points that He covers. My first concepts focused on making the type "The Beatitudes" beautiful but I wanted more depth to the project. I also wanted to include some of my layout design and packaging skills to this project. That's when it hit me. Why not create each scripture verse as a product in the The Beatitudes product line?
My inspiration started by looking up beauty products from several different lines. This was a very foreign world to a single dude so I needed all the inspiration I could get. I looked into introductory level brands and worked my way up to the more prestigious lines. What made these lines feel classy? How does color influence emotion? How are cosmetics marketed when you don't see them applied to a model?
To make it relatable to a more masculine audience as well, I pulled inspiration from footwear packaging. Each box in the artwork has a little fabric pull tab with a printed cardboard sleeve. It's a subtle touch that helps bridge the gap between the male and female congregation at Kalos.
More continued below
This series was a return to one of my first loves, layout design. I've always been fascinated with combining text, color, and imagery into a compelling layout. My first couple career jobs were in graphic design and layout was a big part of my role, so it was fun to start this project in Adobe Illustrator to create the can graphics.
Since I was designing these for 3d, I had to keep in mind the different properties of 3d like reflection, glossiness, and bump, since it's not just color. In one of the images above, you can see the Illustrator artboards with the color and metallic information. The white/black in the layout tells the renderer which elements are metallic and not.
If you look closely, you can see fingerprints on several of the surfaces. Little details like this help ground the imagery in the real work to help make it more believable.
Lighting the scene was pretty straight-forward. I wanted a soft spotlight on the entire scene with the metallic "The Beatitudes" text to pop, so I put circular area light with a long snoot to focus rays for the soft vignette. There are a couple other area lights to help brighten up some of the black elements and pull out the grunge textures. Finally, I added a very dim HDRI image. It doesn't add a ton of extra light into the scene, but it's really meant to add detail to reflections.