Blaxploitation Movie Poster
- 70s soul poster
- Shaft style
- funk poster
A painted hero in a dynamic pose, hot funk colours, and a tagline in chunky 70s type.
Opens an image model with the prompt in it. The price is on the page before you sign in.
What it is for
Blaxploitation posters are among the most confident figure compositions in commercial art. The hero is always centred, always in control, and always painted rather than photographed.
The colour is the other half. Burnt orange against purple is a combination almost nobody else used, and it dates the work to one decade instantly.
How it works
Centre one painted hero in a dynamic pose, lit with airbrushed rim light, looking straight out or mid-action.
Radiate a montage of smaller painted scenes and faces around them, on a flat coloured field rather than a photographic background.
Hot funk palette: burnt orange, gold, purple, hot pink. Chunky rounded 1970s display type with a hard shadow, a bold tagline above the title, and a condensed credit block at the foot.
When to use it
Use it for a soul or funk night, a film season, a dance event, a barbershop or street food event, a fundraiser, a 70s night.
Leave it alone if you are not going to do the research. The genre has a real and contested history.
Told apart from its neighbours
Hong Kong posters pack the sheet with equal-sized faces. Here one hero dominates and the rest orbit.
Push Pin is flat decorative illustration. This is airbrushed and modelled.
Psychedelic seventies corporate shares the palette and has no figures at all.
Where it was used
Shaft in 1971 and Superfly in 1972 set the format, and the soundtracks by Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield are as remembered as the films. The painted poster tradition ran through the decade and was revived wholesale by Jackie Brown in 1997.
- Shaft
- Superfly
- Cleopatra Jones
The prompt
Replace the blanks with your own event, keep the rest. Then run it on an image model.
poster for <event>, 1970s blaxploitation movie poster, one confident hero painted in a dynamic action pose at the centre, a montage of smaller painted scenes and faces radiating around them, hot funk palette of burnt orange gold purple and hot pink against a flat coloured field, thick 1970s display type with rounded chunky letterforms and a hard shadow, a bold tagline above the title, airbrushed rim light on the figures, <date, time and place> in a credit block set in condensed capitals
What goes wrong
The model returns a photographic film poster. Ask for a painted hero with airbrushed rim light on a flat coloured field, not photography.
The second failure is a muted palette. Say burnt orange, gold, purple and hot pink at full strength.
Leave out
muted colour, photography, restraint, thin type, minimal layout
Watch for
The hero has to look in control. The whole genre is about competence, not peril.
Questions
Print it
Pay for the one run. No subscription, and the price is on the model page before you sign in.
