Team Fortress 2 Fan Art

In search of fan art, I stuck with the military theme and stumbled onto a piece inspired by the Team Fortress 2 video game, and designed in the genre of WWII poster propaganda.

The graphic and typographic styles are so reminiscent of the era that a Channel One Russia documentary on WWII-era American propaganda apparently presented it as a legitimate artifact—kind of like foreign media outlets basing reports on stories in The Onion. I don’t know enough about generating images in a digitized format to comment with authority on how the artist put it together; e.g., did he/she draw the images and scan them, or were they stock images that were manipulated through drawing software? At any rate, the graphic is a composite of image and type set on a crumpled-wrapping–paper background that more than likely was a filler selected from a group of options. Same with the red swath beneath the soldier, which provides contrast and evokes the type of bloodthirstiness we see in the “Huns” portrayed in American WWI- and WWII-era posters and fliers. I think the piece effectively achieves the artist’s purpose in evoking some cultural context to add “realism” and fun to fellow gamers’ experience, while also poking fun at the ham-handed nature of wartime propaganda.