I made this poster for my Muay Thai coach Lance as a going-away gift:

I went to Coach Lance’s 7:30am Muay Thai classes three times a week for about a year and a half; that was my rookie stage, when you have the most to learn and progress is fast. Then Lance left our gym to move to LA and develop his acting career (he’s a man of many talents).

Concept

Lance would always say “So I’m here in space with my partner…” as he was demonstrating something in class (meaning “I’m spaced this far away from my training partner / just outside of striking distance”), and in my groggy morning mind I would think “heh, ‘in space.'”

So that’s the joke: Muay Thai in space.

Process

When I think of “space” as a cultural idea, I think of vintage futurism posters like these:

I cobbled together the backdrop of my image by taking elements from these posters and rearranging them in Photoshop.

My AI-generated boxing astronauts had the classic AI tells; the more you look, the more little inconsistencies you find. But when I reduce all the color information to get that screen printed look, many of the details disappear anyway, and what’s left is easy to fix.

My process, which I’ve done quite a few times now, is to do color transformations in the Blender node editor and do manual spot fixes in Photoshop.

And I picked the retro-futurist title font from a pool of good candidates I found on 1001fonts and dafont.com. I love picking fonts; there are just so many good ones available for free.

Lance loved the pun. I printed two posters: one to give to him and one to hang up at the gym.