Warrior Poets Graphic Revealed

So Monday I finished up the graphic for the upcoming sermon series Warrior Poets: Biblical Manhood. I thought I'd share a little bit of my creative process with this particular graphic. Unfortunately, they don't come as easy as some may think. I had a screen writing professor in college compare an idea to a pile of crap with a golden nugget inside. Basically, you have to dig and sort through all the surrounding crap to get to the golden nugget. This process is very obvious in this particular graphic design.

The first image I thought of when I heard the phrase Warrior Poet was Mel Gibson's character from Braveheart. I like the vivid imagery of the blue war paint on his face. So I attempted to recreate that in a graphic. In my mind Warrior Poet is an oxymoron, so it needed an edge but also a softer, sensual quality. Usually 9 times out of 10, the first graphic is just there to work out the overall idea. Seen here, it's plainly a terrible graphic. Keep diggin' Brandt.

As I worked through this first I idea, I kept coming back to a western feel with Native American Indians. Shortly after that I had my "Ah Ha" moment and found my golden nugget in the shape of a feathered arrow(this only took me about a month). The warrior side would be an arrow and the poet side would be a fountain pen. Warrior. Poet. In turn as I designed the new graphic I moved from the western feel into more of a Frank Miller's 300, graphic novel type feel.

All in all I think it came out nicely, and a lot better than I could have expected. But isn't that how God works?