I decided to go with a vintage feel for the poster and picked a backdrop that I thought would enhance my circus act the best - red is a very happy color so I thought id work best with a circus poster. I also started experimenting with some fonts and adding different shadows behind it to make it pop.

I decided to get rid of the font because I didn't think it looked good and cut out an image in place of it - I think it better emphasizes my main act (the strong man). I used a layer mask to do this. 

I was planning on using more of the stripes from the pervious image but I think the fully cut out version looks the sharpest.

I found this image off of an old carnival poster and decided to see what it would look like - I used a layer mask clean up the lines and put a cartoon effect on top of it to make it look more vintage and stand out from the background already in place.

I further cleaned up the layer mask and rearranged it on my background.

I also cut out the bottom feet so it would look like it was standing on top of the tent - I used another layer mask to do this.

I thought the poster looked rather boring and I wanted to see what adding another "strong man" would look like. I used a layer mask to cut out the original image and I added saturation and vibrancy to the picture. I realized at this point that the two images would not work well together.

Going with what I thought looked best, I deleted the first "strong man" because I wanted emphasize the second one. I looked around for images that I thought would showcase him the best and I I found a "module" of two men wrestling and a vintage looking font that I think looks great together. I merged the images so that it would be easy for me to manipulate them on my page and create symmetrical feel by equally adjusting the colors. 

At this point I was pretty happy with the main components and only adjusted them slightly by making the strong man/modules/font bigger. I also layer masked the feet at 50% opacity because it makes it look more coherent with the background. I didn't do 100% opacity on the feet because it cut off too much of the strong man and made the picture look incomplete.

To complete the poster I added a few other items (lady on elephant / vintage hand) because I wanted to show that the circus wasn't just about the strong man - there are other acts to look forward to!

To complete the poster I increased the saturation and used the canvas filter to make it look like a cloth poster. I did some research and the vintage carnival posters were made with a mix of paper from different paper companies to save money. I think this texture works best because of this.