Gig Poster Project
Introduction
This project, was meant to not only to illustrate ideas but emotions and music. In other words, we were tasked to make a gig poster off of a non-existent band of a genre of our choosing. Gradients are not allowed, and the poster must include the name of the band and be incorporated into the image.
My overall goal was to make my poster look like it belongs in that genre, and to use an effective texture mask on my image.
Step #1 Which Genre?
Before I even begin with thinking of design ideas I had to figure out the main part of the poster, the genre of music of the band I am making.
I immediately thought of my all time favorite bands Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys. At this point however it wasn't clear that we needed to make our own band and not use a pre-existing one, and starting thinking of some design ideas based around Flogging Molly.
Luckily the professor let us know about this at the end of class and due to the horizon expanding on the design choices for the poster I began thinking of other genres of music.
Should I do Celtic Punk like Flogging Molly or Dropkick Murphys?
How about House like Daft Punk or Justice?
Plain Punk Rock?
How about Classic Rock (that idea died very quickly)
Techno? Jumpstyle? Trance? Eurobeat? J-Pop? Ska?
The ideas came very quickly, and I decided on the genre of music I enjoyed the most, and one where I can make it a tribute rather than a design idea.
In the end, I chose Celtic Punk Rock, as Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys made me love in the beginning.
Step #2 What Makes Celtic Music? Punk Rock?
This project didn't give me immediate ideas like my others did, so I ended up going an extra step, where I had to figure out the mashup between Celtic (Irish) music and Punk Rock.
The Celtic section came immediately, as I love Celtic culture and music, so coming up with ideas on what makes up Celtic music came easily.
But the punk rock section became a little harder, as most of my knowledge of punk rock came either from Celtic Punk or from either older bands or from the popular punk rock bands like Offspring and Green Day. Due to this I had much fewer ideas in the Punk rock section than the Celtic Section.
After I had finished with the Punk Rock section new Ideas starting springing forwards when I thought of putting 2 ideas together. That means it's now time to sketch out my ideas.
Step #3 Sketching
This was easily one of my harder sketches I have done, because I was trying to figure out what combinations can I do that makes the user know it's both Celtic and Punk Rock that hasn't been done before?
A skull singing into a microphone with Celtic Icons? Too in your face.
How about the resistance icon with a microphone covered in Irish Tattoos? That can work, but it can be easily be confused with sailor rather than Irish.
Resistance with Celtic knot border? I like it, but there would be too much white space to work with, and it will look plain.
How about a more complex Celtic border but with the resistance symbol? This solves the white space issue but it's still too in your face and they don't mesh too well.
A few others came to mind, but it started to become more and more difficult to find 2 ideas that work together, and can be unified well
It wasn't until class the next day where I had developed the idea that will be incorporated into my design. While looking for examples of Celtic Punk posters online, I noticed that many featured skeletons but rarely do they play anything that's not a guitar. So, I thought why not a Banjo or a Mandolin? i could even make it look like an Irish worker in the states during the early 1900's, so a flat cap can be added to his head. I could even use the Celtic border idea I had from my sketches. After this, I began making my first draft.
Step #4 The First Draft
This came out very well. I had spent a large portion of the time making this on the borders, as the dipping in and out became a huge task, and then making them repeat using the pattern tool, (and learning to use the pattern tool), also took a huge chunk of time.
I ended up choosing Cu Chulainn, as I knew that he was an Irish mythological hero, and that one of my favorite Irish songs named the Blood of Cu Chulainn, so i felt that this would fit perfectly.
The skull and flat cap was rather easy to do, as I took a few elements from skulls in other posters to get the right angle and shape.
The hardest part was the ribs and torso. There was so much detail in the ribs that I was going to leave out/modify quite a few bones. Since the border took half the time, the ribs was pretty much a quarter of the time working on this draft. After that, everything else was easy. The banjo was the easiest thing to do, and I rushed the hands as I was running out of time and wanted to at least get the composition done before critique
Step #5 Second Draft
The critiques for my draft was rather straightforward, Banjos don't use picks, put the name inside the border, when strumming the arm goes over the banjo, the angle of the banjo is off, etc.
There were 3 issues that would cause the most headaches in the future
Take out the borders of the patterns, These were made as objects rather than strokes which means that it can (and did) take almost 2-3 hours to fix. Another is the work on the hands, this wouldn't have been much of an issue, but finding good references for skeletal hands strumming and pressing down strings is impossible. Lastly it was to make the strokes look less boring, it is worth noting that I would have no clue how to fix this until I worked on my final draft.
Due to the difficulty of the last 3 issues I only did a few of them. Notably, the border strokes and an attempt on fixing the issue with the strokes. as you can see, I was completely lost on how to fix it.
Step #6 The Final Draft
Luckily at class the professor gave us info on a tool in illustrator that I can use. The line width tool. The line width tool allows me to change the width of the stroke of a line at different points.This means that instead of flat strokes I can add width and depth to my images.
But there is another issue that prevented the final draft from being easy to complete. The hands. Due to the lack of good references I had to take actual hands of people playing the banjo, and then make them look like bones. Luckily I didn't have to make them look photo-realistic so I can get away of making them look somewhat like hand bones. After that, I changed the banjo a bit, and added frets and design to the banjo's neck. As for a finishing touch I searched and found a good texture to add to my image and overlayed it.
Conclusion
I really enjoyed this project, and I had completed my goals very well. My poster does look like it belongs to a Celtic Punk band, but due to the movie Coco, there could be possible confusion, with the skeleton looking like he's Hispanic. luckily the name and the iconography at the edges and colors should show that the skeleton is of Irish descent. The texture mask I have works perfectly, it adds detail, and texture where it would be bland solid color.
All in all, this project really helped me with making objects from scratch, and to make a subject look interesting with only a few tools. It is safe to say that this project taught me a lot.
