This week's action brings the spectacle of Formula One return to one of the sport's most iconic venues, the Temple of Speed in Monza, Milan. With legendary battles through history, we look back and celebrate our roots with this weeks Behind The Design.

Sean Bull, Senior Graphics Designer at BWT Alpine Formula One Team sits down and takes us through his creative process on this incredible poster.

What emotion or energy did you want to capture from this particular Grand Prix?

With this being the 30th anniversary of another iconic ‘Team Enstone’ win in Monza with the then Italian registered Benetton-Renault team winning its ‘home race’ I really wanted to combine our current car on track with the last Benneton Championship winning machine, the B195

In a similar vein to my Spa poster, I looked at iconic shots from the circuits history and used them to dictate the composition of this piece, and go after a more realistic and photographic tone rather than a more stylized aesthetic for this one, and with Parabolica being one of the most recognisable corners on the entire calendar with some awesome angles captured there over the years, I settled on trying to recreate one of these shots, looing at all eras, from the slipstreaming of the 60s to the more rustic feel of the 90s shots and even the sense of speed given by todays cars, and it was that sense of speed that I really wanted to convey here.

With this sensation of speed and the way the camera works in our CGI program, I had to work out how real world camera settings, exposure, F-stops and shutter speeds, looking at how tracking and panning shots works in the real world and copying those settings into our program to mimic the same results, a lot of trial and error went into getting the shots I wanted here, balancing the effect of blurring the car too much, or the background and striking a balance between the two.

What role did texture or layering play in your final composition?

A lot of time was set up texturing and getting the cars, helmets ready, with a ground up re-build of the B195 needed I had to go over our internal archives to find the correct colour codes, and sponsor logos from that 1995 car and of course make the branding correct to the non-tobacco version.

This was achieved in a mix of Substance painter to get the lines of the car correct after redrawing them in illustrator and bringing them in to map onto the car, trying to line up the sweeping lines for the nose to the chassis body was extremely difficult and required an awful lot of trial and error, eventually I got to a point where I was happy with the overall livery of the car and its key logo placements, to then bring into photoshop and fine tune, with all logo adjustments made and specific to the Monza Johnny Herbert spec for that race, from here some quick modifications were made for the driver helmet to match Herbert’s from that race, as is key with both the car and helmet, I gather as many references as possible to make sure both the livery, materials and textures are as correct as possible for the time.