Kyle Lambert

**Kyle Lambert** is a digital artist and illustrator renowned for his movie posters and photorealistic illustrations. As the official illustrator for *Stranger Things*, he has provided key art for the first, second, third and fourth seasons, as well as several other illustrations for media related to the series.

## History

### Early Life

Lambert was born in Manchester, England. He began drawing at an early age, his key inspiration being films. He attended Manchester Metropolitan University where he studied art and trained as a traditional oil painter. He eventually became interested in technology and after buying his first Wacom tablet, he began to draw digitally. At some point after graduating, he moved to Los Angeles, California.

### Early Career

In order to establish himself as a digital artist, Lambert began posting painting videos to his YouTube channel. A video of him finger painting a photorealistic portrait of Morgan Freeman received much attention, allowing his work to be noticed by companies such as Adobe and Apple. He would partner with these companies to create videos demonstrating their products. Around this time, he was requested to create his first movie poster for the J. J. Abrams film *Super 8*. This launched his career as a movie poster artist.

### *Stranger Things*

Believing the retro style of Lambert’s *Super 8* poster would work well with *Stranger Things*, Netflix reached out to him through Contend, a design agency. Before creating the main poster, Lambert was requested to create digital illustrations of key moments from the show, with the goal of replicating a classic ‘80s style through digital techniques. While creating these paintings, he was able to perfect the technique he would later use to illustrate the season’s poster. The illustrations were printed onto canvas and given to the cast as wrap gifts, with a complete set given to Shawn Levy.

After being given a loose composition by Contend, Lambert worked with the the agency’s art director Nate Sherman on how they could tell the show’s story through a single image. He was given access to rough-cuts of the episodes and a library of still images for reference. Once the composition was settled, Lambert was given the task of completing the poster. The initial sketches, as well as blocking and basic colors, were done in the Procreate App on the iPad Pro using an Apple Pencil. The layers were then exported to Photoshop where he added detail to the artwork at a higher resolution. The poster took nearly three weeks to complete.

Lambert was again contacted to create a poster for the show’s second season. Like the first poster, Lambert was given access to rough-cuts of first few episodes and collaborated with the team at Netflix on which direction the poster would take.

Both posters have become central to the marketing of the series, being featured on billboards, clothing, action figures, and other merchandise.

Lambert later created a variant cover for the debut issue of the *Stranger Things* comic series, and illustrated the cover of the companion book, *Stranger Things: Worlds Turned Upside Down*. He additionally illustrated the key art for the show’s upcoming attraction that will be featured at Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights event.

## Gallery

Season 1 poster.Season 2 poster.Season 3 poster.Season 4 Vol 1. poster.Season 4 Vol 2. poster.Variant cover for the first issue of the comic.Key art for the Halloween Horror Nights event.Cover for Stranger Things: Worlds Turned Upside Down.Artwork featured on merchandise for the third season.
## External links

* Official website
* Instagram
* Twitter
* DeviantArt

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 ”Movie Poster Artist, Kyle Lambert talks about his work” *Huffington Post*. November 30, 2017
2. ↑ ”Stranger Things Paintings by Kyle Lambert”
3. ↑ ”Stanger Things Poster Key Art by Kyle Lambert”
4. ↑ ""STRANGER THINGS" COMES TO DARK HORSE" *Dark Horse Comics*. June 18, 2018
5. ↑ "Stranger Things Halloween Horror Nights Maze First Look Image Debuts" *ComingSoon*. July 30, 2018