It is no secret that I am a fan of Japanese Kaiju movies. What you may not know is I also like praying mantids.

 

After I brainstormed what I wanted to create, I looked for large rights-free images to use to compose a poster. I found two mantis images and cropped them from their backgrounds. I then found an image of an Asian cityscape (it may be Japan, I don't read the language so I can't tell.) To have a sense of action I found an image with two jets and cropped them too.

 

I arranged the images and adjusted them to darken for mood and nighttime light. I added some smoke using a custom brush in two colors of gray and blurred/smudged them until I had what I wanted. The jets are firing on the larger mantis so I added missile fire and explosions with glow layer adjustments.

 

I used a translator to get the Japanese text and copied/pasted the text in Japanese and English in parentheses. The tagline uses "pray" as in praying mantis and I made it red and oblique for emphasis. The actress is a real Japanese actress and everyone knows Will Smith.