Exercise Museum Posters

The brief for this exercise was to produce some ideas for a museum poster, which would fit in one of three age catergories: - 5-9 year olds, 13-16 year olds and Adults.

The museum I chose was the Tutankhamun Exhibition in Dorchester.  It is quite a small museum, but it is packed with replicas of Tutankhamun’s treasures, that were taken from his tomb in Egypt, in the 1920’s by archaeologist, Howard Carter.

I started by visiting the museum and walking around the exhibits, photography is not allowed inside the exhibition, so I had to sketch a few of the exhibits, and then try to gather images from the internet, to create a moodboard for each age group.

Using simple spider diagrams, I tried out a few words for each age catergory.

For the 5-9 year olds catergory, I wanted fun to be the theme, so I thought about when I was a young girl watching mystery cartoons such as Scooby Doo, where mummies were portrayed as scary, but also had a comic element to them, so that they didn’t frighten children too much, this was something I wanted to try to put into the design of the poster.

For the 13-16 catergory, the image had to be more interesting.

Teenagers like to see images that are more graphic, such as more macabre detail, so a mummies face could be used in the museum poster design.

For the Adult catergory, I felt this could have more information about the story behind Tutankhamun, but the images could be a little more cryptic, and you would only find out their meaning if you visited the museum.

Following on from the spider diagrams, I moved on to thumbnail sketches, to try out ideas, working out the layout, and whether I would include text in the posters or not.

Once these ideas had been worked out, I sketched three of them in larger sizes, one for each catergory, and placed printed text, from my laptop onto each of them, so that I could finalise the layout.

The medium I decided to work with was acrylic ink, which I had used on a previous exercise, and which came in bright colours, making a poster seen from a distance attractive to the viewer.

I tested the ink on two out of the three large drawings, seeing if I could get the colours I needed.

The blue that I tried out for the second image, as a background colour was brilliant, but I felt the layout lacked something.

Looking back at the images I had gathered, I selected another one to address the balance problem, that was happening at the bottom of this poster design.  Once this had been solved I drew out this design on Bristol Board, which is an incredibly smooth surface, good for graphic images.

When colouring the image I had drawn out, I found that the ink, especially on the blue background was streaky, and you could see every brush stroke, which was not the effect I wanted.  So to combat this problem I coated the paper several times with the coloured ink, which gave a more solid look to it.

Once the main colours had been done, I drew in the outline of everything with black ink, to give it more structure.

In conclusion, the poster works well, the blue and gold colours are attractive to the eye from a distance, and the subject is easily recognizable.

Overall I am happy with the design, although in the end I think I would have preferred to work on a slightly rougher surface where the ink would have soaked into the paper, perhaps giving a less patchy appearance.