Assignment 3

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.