London!

London
20 x 15 inches

This is the first installment of city/country posters!  During the past few days I've been working on finishing drawings from my Europe trip.   With all the sights, monuments, and characters, the London illustration sums up my three weeks in the city. 

Stay tuned for Copenhagen, eastern Europe, Spain, and Tanzania!

Revival of Alexander

Revived an old word play illustration from 2009.  It is now available as prints and t-shirts at my Society 6 store! 

Pinnacle: Reinvent the Icon

Recently, I was approached by Joshua Katcher of The Discerning Brute. He wanted to feature my "Furocious" poster on his website Pinnacle: Reinvent the Icon. The website is dedicated to providing awareness and critical commentary on the fashion industry in regards to fur.

Check out the feature here.

Fur Free Alliance - Design Against Fur poster competition

Furocious
11 x 17 inches
Pen and Digital

The latest project we worked on in Poster Illustration revolved around political/social/environmental issues/causes.  We had the option of doing whatever or creating a poster for the Fur Free Alliance's Design Against Fur competition.  I had a number of ideas ranging from fur-free to recycling to pollution. I ended up going with my concept for the Fur Free poster.   

Birds of Avalon

Birds of Avalon
18 x 24 inches

The Savannah Stopover Music Festival was holding a poster contest for the upcoming festival.  Mohamed (prof) assigned it as a project for our poster class.  I made mine for a band called Birds of Avalon (I don't really know them other than 1-2 songs).

A Hard Day's Night - film poster

A Hard Day's Night - film poster
Pen, watercolor, digital
20 x 30 inches

The first assignment in Poster Design class with Mohamed Danawi was to create a film poster.  This is my take on The Beatles' first film, A Hard Day's Night, 1964.  The movie is a bit like a mockumentary of their lives at the time at height of Beatlemania.  The film has some hilarious dialog and lots of screaming girls.

Porsche Poster

Ink, paper, digital
20 x 30 inches - print size
 
The last project assigned in Publications class was to create a vintage looking poster for Porsche but using their new cars.  The head Porsche guy in the South US region wants to bring illustrative posters back (verses using photographs and all graphic design stuff).   So he's going to use our posters to pitch his idea to his superiors...ie: Porsche North America.

2011 Hilton Head International Young Artists Piano Competition

Hilton Head International Youth Artists Piano Competition
Digital
February 2010

For our third assignment in Computer Illustration we had to create a book cover or make a poster for the 2011 Hilton Head International Young Artists Piano Competition. The guidelines were to illustrate the cover/poster using digital collage and create and use at least three of our own digital brushes. We could scan in drawings, textures, hand-written text, etc and combine it all in Photoshop. I had a hard time getting started, bounced many cover ideas back and forth for about three class periods and a number of hours outside. Eventually I decided that the poster might work better. But I was having issues with that too. However, after many, MANY hours working on the piece, it's finally finished, along with my sanity. I hope it looks ok - the text/typeface is what caused the most grief for me. Good thing I'm not a graphic designer.

Hypnotic Brass Ensemble

Poster design for Concept & Composition class. We could pick any topic as long as it fell into the following categories: social or political concern, educational, theater, or music related. I had a bunch of ideas running through my head, but the one with most potential was for a band. The band is Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. If you haven't heard them, you're missing out. Go to Youtube and look up their songs! "Baliky Bon" and "Sankofa" are two of my favourites.

Their music has so much energy and I wanted to portray that. The instruments burst out at the viewer, and, hopefully, the varying sizes of the instruments' bells illustrate the dynamic quality of HBE's music.

The professor and other students kept making comments during the critique about how I might want to experiment with adjusting colors and switching one color for another etc, then I realized they thought the work was digital! When I pointed out it was traditional, they were all pretty stunned, and took a closer look!

I did the thumbnails by hand, the prelims (grayscale and color) in Photoshop and the final version with gouache and pen on cold press watercolor paper.


Gouache and pen on coldpress watercolor paper
original: 9 x 6.5 inches
reproduction size: 18 x 13