This poster was kind of a weird experiment—a kitbash between photography, generative AI, and digital painting. I had only 6 hours before the scvreening at the Plaza Theater and really wanted to give posters to the cast, so I had to use a non-traditional approach. Here's how I pulled it all together with limited time and no Photoshop license.
I began by taking a photo of Ray Tracing's helmet, isolating it in Photoshop (well actually Photopea), and placing it against a kitbashed background made from NASA space imagery and some hand-drawn elements.
I used Invoke AI, which lets you feed in your real photos and sketches using ControlNets with the open-source SDXL diffusion model. That allowed me to keep the structure of my design while enhancing it with generative details.
I also loaded in a LoRA trained on Drew Struzan's artwork (the Star Wars poster artist). This gave the rough poster a hand-painted look and generated a bunch of cool variations in his style.
Back in Photoshop (again, Photopea in my case), I composited together bits and pieces from several AI-generated variations I liked. It was like digital collage-meets-concept art.
Once I had a composite I was happy with, I brought it back into Invoke to upscale it to full poster resolution.
Finally, I returned to Photoshop/Photopea, hand-painted over the messy AI artifacts, added the title text, and did some final cleanup. And badabing badaboom we had a poster.
Kitbashing is awesome. For the 2025 Buzz Studios metal shirt design I used a bunch of isolated photos, then layered grunge and threshold filters over everything to give it the stylized band tee look.
Don’t sleep on Photopea. It’s a free, browser-based alternative to Photoshop, and it can do basically everything I needed for this poster workflow. I also know the CEO of Invoke and they truly care about enhancing artists instead of replacing them, so I would highly recommend their tool to anyone interested.
This process was a little janky, a little experimental, but a lot of fun. If you’re short on time or tools, blending real photography, AI generation, and some digital elbow grease can still get you pretty far. Just be ready to improvise.
