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.

Exercise - Making a mock up

For this exercise I chose a book that I have had for many years, and which is still a favourite.

The book tells the story of a group of boys living in a small seaside town in America.

They are facing the prospect of losing their homes through developers, and decide to spend their last day together.

They find a map in the attic of central character, Mikey’s house, and set off in pursuit of fame and fortune.

The original cover shows the characters hanging from a stalactite above a faded treasure map, and reading the blurb on the back of the book it is not hard to see what the brief was.

The brief was obviously to show characters from the book and film, in a perilous situation, to show adventure, treasure seeking etc, but I am not sure this is clear.

I decided to go with something that would reflect the style that had been created with the original cover, but with a different content.

I started by sketching out some ideas, using images from the film, it was important that I see if I could draw a good likeness.

Using these drawings I could then move on to a thumbnail sketch of the layout.

I drew several thumbnails, but I went with the first one, as I liked it the most, as it was the most balanced, as far as content was concerned.

I enlarged this image by 1.5 times, and left spaces where the text, title etc would go.

Following this, I photocopied some of the images of the characters I had previously sketched, cut them out, then using a lightbox I placed these under the enlarged layout and then traced the outlines.

Once these things were placed, I drew in the title text, finally, I traced all of this onto a sheet of Bristol board as this was close in texture to the original as I could get.

Because of the style of my painting I chose to use acrylic paint as the media to work with, because it is easy to correct any mistakes, and you can paint thickly or thinly as required.

Overall, I think this image has worked well, the only technical drawback was that the paper buckled slightly.

The colour of the parchment as the background, makes the other images’ colours stand out well, and the text on top, that will be added during production would be clear to read.