Contest Contest - SotW #611 Villains

[IronSkull86]

Create a signature based on Villains

Closing date for submissions: 14th October 2024

Next Week's Theme

Fall / Autumn

Submission Stage Rules:

Participating rules:

• Anyone can submit.
• Screenshots are allowed JUST be creative. Don't leave them unedited!
• Signatures resolution must be 500x250 or less. Make sure you do stick to the size limit. Width AND height. Entries with more pixels than the size limit won't be put up for the vote!
• Do not use your past work which has already been submitted to the competition.
• Do not use work that has been taken from another Author.
• No Nudity.
• No offensive remarks.

Breaking any of these rules can, and will, lead to disqualification from the current weeks SoTW.  

Participants can also write about their submitted signature. To do so, please write it underneath a title, Creator's Note. It will then be pasted under your submission in the voting stage.

[Helena Revan]

 

Artist's Note:

Spoiler

I came up with this idea when I saw the theme "villains".  I imagined people would have supervillains in mind, but that's not what the title says, and I wanted to come up with something different!  If anyone isn't sure who this is, it's one of the main characters from Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film, Psycho, starring Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh (and its various sequels).  The image of Norman Bates is rendered from a promotional photo for the film, while the background is a shot of the exterior set for the Bates Motel, which still exists on the Universal Studios lot.  The house was modeled after the one in Edward Hopper's 1925 painting, The House by the Railroad:

 

I gave the background, which was quite sharp, a slight Gaussian blur to give the illusion of depth, and carefully framed Norman's head between the motel sign and the house, so that you could see the back edge of the house.  Normally I place the subject of a signature off to one side, but here I wanted to use his head-on, slightly creepy gaze, which is clearly the center of attention, even as you want to look away from his eyes...

 

The "No Vacancy" lettering on the left is in Futura, which I also used for my signature.  For the neon glow, I substituted a bright pink version of "Vacancy" for the darker version (though they're the same hue and saturation), and overlaid two Gaussian blurs of it with different levels of diffusion to make it look more intense.  I wavered between Futura Heavy and some other fonts for the title, before finding the distressed "Veteran Typewriter" font.  I wanted something distinctly modern, but typewriter fonts seem to fit the theme, like something you'd find on a police or psychiatric report.  And I didn't want it to be sharp or perfect—I wanted something that looked gritty, perhaps typed on an older, shop-worn typewriter without a fresh ribbon, or on cheap paper that didn't hold the ink perfectly.

 

The animation is very simple, just two frames for 1,500 milliseconds each, to give a steady, metronome-like rhythm.  I did make a more complex, irregular version with a flickering effect using eight frames, but I think the steady one is better.  Here's the other one:

 

[IronSkull86]

Leaving this contest up 1 more week.

 

The new Closing date will be the 21st October 2024

Edited October 15 by IronSkull86

[RoseTyler]

Not my best work imo but meh.
*Jim Moriarty... Hiiiiii*

[IronSkull86]

Contest is now Closed.

 

Voting stage as well as a new SotW contest will be up soon.