Protect Your Pineal Gland

In recent years, there has been a raising of awareness as to the importance of the Pineal Gland, the gland centred in the human brain that is considered by many to be the seat of consciousness. A great deal of information has been written about this subject, and I highly recommend that you appraise yourself of this knowledge; much if it you may find to be invaluable to your growth and betterment as a human being.

However I think it is equally important to maintain a sense of humour in relation to these things. And so with this in mind I designed a public service announcement poster about this topic: PROTECT YOUR PINEAL GLAND

This is in reference to reports a few years back of airport scanners being designed to target and calcify the pineal gland in the brain, thus rendering people docile and unaware, incapable of evolving themselves in any meaningful way.
I've tried to give the poster a retro look to really capture a feeling of both paranoia and innocence. Also present is the notion of there being a dual choice in the matter; they can scan you or they can feel you up. Either way you're going to get put through the motions.

Here are the preliminary sketches. This shows some of my thought process while developing the idea, both determining the layout and what sort of copy to write for the poster. By the time I had gotten to the third one above I had pretty much all of the elements in place that were required .

All I needed to do was create some cleaner versions of the couple and the title lettering and I was ready to go. I was still sketching out other things at that point, as can be seen by the light drawing of the plane above the lettering.

After completing this I scanned the third sketch and the cleaned up pencil/ink elements into my computer and decided to render them in Flash. At the time I'd yet to purchase a tablet and so found myself drawing with a mouse. To that end it turned out that the brush in Flash seemed to work better with a mouse, providing a smoother line. What I did was render different elements of the overall image separately, and then export them as .png images.

Then I opened the elements in Photoshop and, using the sketch as a template, composed them together. There was a little extra drawing and rendering to do, as well as some gradients. After that I applied filters and textures to various parts, like film grain for the sky and marble texture (https://www.textures.com) for the plane. Added the lettering with the type tool (rasterizing and adding gradients to "airport scanners"), and that's basically it.

Phew! That's a lot of steps! Like going through Customs!

So who knows whether airport scanners are really having such effects on our minds. With some of the technology out there and all of this wireless 5G network stuff coming down the line, it's becoming more understandable if you've decided to discreetly line the inside of your hat with tinfoil.

In addition to any steps you may choose to make, what is imperative is to try to develop the strength of your mind to it's fullest potential. We're all being bathed in this stuff one way or the other, and it's up to you to try to build up as much of an immunity to it as you can. This is why maintaining a healthy sense of humour is so important to me. Oh and as one last note, I wondered if the "getting felt up" part made it kind of NSFW, but then it occurred to me that this is precisely what the security personel at airports are doing for their job... If it's safe enough for their work then it's safe enough for yours, and you can tell your boss I said that! (seriously though your employability is on you)

So do you think a poster like this provides a necessary public service? Would you put this up in your home, or as a sticker on your laptop? Or is it all just too weird?