Hasegawa Shoutai was looking for some media for their Facebook page to promote an upcoming living history event based on the Nomonhan Incident in 1939. We thought magazine style covers based off the famous Asahi Graph would fit the bill nicely. We also took a play on the name of the group replacing Shoutai with Shimbun (Japanese for Newspaper) which keeps the same acronym HS for both.
Process
Most of the images used were of unit members taken on period correct black and white cameras. Most image based magazines of the time rarely used black and white photos for the cover, instead manually tinting them and colorizing. Luckily for us, Photoshop makes this task a little bit easier. Pictured right is the original image for one of the covers before being edited.
Here is the image after colorization and editing to make it more life like. We wanted to still maintain the feel however of period tinting methods, which were less than exact and often dulled the skin tones or over exaggerated some colors.
With the colorized image in hand, we then began to mock it up with logos, dates, and all of the other bits needed for a stylish magazine cover. The text boxes we wanted to be legible for Anglophone readers, so we did an English overlay while still keeping the Japanese characters visible behind as many early scans and translations often did. After that we ran it through texturizers and added grain to help give it the feel of a scanned original cover
In all we did five covers, with each containing content and dates that reflected a major theme of the conflict. Check out the rest below!
