The brief : To
design an illustration for a music event poster.
I chose to design
a poster for my favourite pop artist, Adele, particularly photographs of her,
and was surprised by how many were actually black and white.
This monochrome
colour scheme was something that I could consider using in the final
illustration.
Placing all of the
images into three catergories of mood board, I then moved onto sketching out
some ideas in thumbnail form.
I know that Adele
has sung at the Royal Albert Hall in the last few months, so this would make a
good venue for my fictional poster and perhaps a dramatic backdrop because of
the style and shape of the building.
During the
sketching of the thumbnails I played around with the layout and design of the
poster, but still felt I needed some more black and white images to see if this
could work.
Using a tonal
scale I had found for a previous exercise, this helped me paint a couple of
tonal images in acrylic to test how well the monochrome effect would work.
Once this had been
done, I then went back to the thumbnails and chose two of my favourites to
redraw.
Producing the two
A3 sized sketches presented me with a problem of drawing and redrawing the same
image over and over, while still maintaining a likeness to the artist.
As you can see
this is not successful on the first layout, but better on the second.
I was still able
to use these sketches or line visuals to help me decide which layout worked the
best.
The first layout
worked well, but the drawback was that there was too much dead space left at
the top of the poster, where nothing in particular was happening.
By changing the
position of the lettering, this solved the dead space problem, and left space
at the bottom of the poster for dates, times and promoters details.
So the second
layout would be the one I would use to produce my final illustration.
I enlarged the A3
size by 1.5 times, to give me a larger area to work with, because I was adding
some text to the image.
I drew the layout
in pencil first, and made a couple of adjustments to it that I had not included
in the A3 line visual, the main one being , adding the ‘21’ in the bottom left corner, which was the
current album title when she performed at the Royal Albert Hall, a few months
ago.
Using the tonal
range, I had found, I painted the images, finishing with the text, which was in
white.
I had to make sure
that the background (the black) had no white specks in it as these would still
show up when reproduced in the final size.
Overall, I am
pleased that I have produced an effective illustration for a promotional poster
of my chosen artist and venue.
The colour scheme
gives it the dramatic effect I was hoping for, and despite having had
‘likeness’ issues earlier on, I am satisfied that this is now a good
representation of Adele.
