DSDeconstructing: The Phrozen Hearts Flyer

I was contacted by the A Mu chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha to make a flyer for their upcoming party, Phrozen Hearts. [Feb 12th at the Indigo Lounge in Evanston... right by Northwestern.... you should probably attend it.] I  agreed and got to work later that week.


The flyer didn't take me more than an hour twenty to make. Not because it was easy to make [or because I'm a boss like that] but because the idea came to my head relatively quickly. I usually have an idea, make something, mess up in the process, and then find something better while fixing it/starting fresh. This time I had an idea, made something, and liked it.

So I started with a couple specific concepts/theme:

• Black and Gold color scheme
• Light blue or maybe silvery secondary color scheme
• Valentines Day
• Alpha
• Frozen
• Grown and Sexy
• Lounge

After I figured I had enough to work with conceptually, I started to put them together. I was initially gonna find some big booty chick, make her black and gold, and get on with my life. But I don't like half-assing anything that's going to be shown to the public and definitely don't like half-assing things done for clients. After a couple minutes of searching, I found an appropriate picture... I guess.

I personally didn't like the picture because the girl is busted as I don't know what, but thankfully, she was not the focal point of the image and there was going to be a lot of manipulation done to the photo, so I decided to march on.

I don't have graphic step by step images, but what I did was increase the contrast on them A LOT, making the dark areas darker and the light areas lighter. Then I applied a filter that gave the lighter areas a glossy look to them. Then I applied another curves layer to increase the contrast, making it look like... extra glossy. Then I added a hue/saturation layer and turned them gold, which made them look more metallic than anything.

I wasn't exactly feeling the NegrOscar statue look, so I decided to implement the "frozen" concept here since black and gold were already covered. I duplicated the gold layer and turned it icy blue, changing it from glossy to frosty. From there, I masked out the blue layer around where I imagined there'd be a lot of body heat like... melting off the ice. Anywhere that was masked turned back to the gold color, giving it the effect you see.

For finishing touches, I experimented with a super curvy beveled layer style for the text to make it look frozen/metallic. I think it worked out okay, but could have looked better. I'll perfect that in the future. I also added a noise layer [you can sort of see black speckles all over their bodies] to add some grit to the overly smooth skin and then added clouds and difference clouds [You can sort of see a cloudy texture on his jeans, but its all over their bodies] to make it look a little more icy. [Burr!]

And that was it.

[Click the image to enlarge. It's kind of a must.]

I got a call later saying that they wanted to make print pluggers. Unfortunately, the pluggers were not 4x6 inches like the e-flyer. The resolution of the pluggers/the necessity of a 1/8" bleed on the edge would have made it necessary for me to make so many changes that I might as well redo the flyer from scratch.

...That's basically what I did other than the text, which I had to mess with a little as well. I wanted to follow the same theme, so  I enlarged some floral patterns to the point that they just looked like colored curvy lines and then I centered the text and made it look uniform/pretty again.

And there you have it. I hope the party is good. [I'm sure it will be]

Congrats Alpha Mu and thanks for the opportunity. I look forward to working with you guys again in the future.

[Yes, I am aware of the typo. Thank you, though.]