Poster commission for Bazaar and Rummage

There has been a delay with my blogs lately as both my laptop and my desktop computer have both decided to give up the ghost and I've been working on them to try and get them up and running.  But as they are in progress I have decided to attempt to write a blog on my phone. First time for everything, So here goes. 

Well I can finally talk about the poster as it has now been published and problems have been solved.  It started when I was approached to set design for the local a drama society I'm a member of called The Sinodun Players whose home is The Corn Exchange theatre in Wallingford.   I have designed a set for them before (pictures in my first blog) and done other backstage and technical help from stage manager to lighting assistance.   This time I was asked by the director to draw up the set floor plan for the stage of her ideas to scale so the workshop can build the set for the up and coming production of 'Bazaar and Rummage' written by Sue Townsend.  Which I did the floor plan and submitted this a few weeks ago.  However, during this meeting with the director it came up that the production only had a temporary poster which was too low resolution to do anything with and would I be willing to look at it and come up with a final poster design. 

So I set about sketching ideas and listing elements I wanted to include based on the script.  I ended up with the final sketch which I emailed to the director and got her approval to move forward. 

  

From here I proceeded by taking a trace of the final sketch and transferring it on to some water colour paper.  I started working the piece in water colour but couldn't get the colours saturation I was looking for with the bright colours of the 80s clothes to I decided to work with my Derwent Inktense pencils which gave the saturation I wanted.  I went ahead and added a background as the play takes place in a village hall, but felt I preferred the design with no locational context. As this drew too much focus away from the original sketch. I again transferred the design to a new piece of paper but this time I used Bristol board for a smoother finish and worked the piece with the Inktense pencils. 

Once I was happy with the colours I again checked with the director if she was happy with the design and colours before I did all the digital work.  Which never having work with Adobe Photoshop I knew would take time.  She was happy so I continued.   Now I didn't have Photoshop so I researched into it and found a trial for a month so went ahead and downloaded Photoshop cc and scanned the work in at a high dpi (1200dpi i think) as I knew the image would require to be enlarged quiet considerably for the larger posters and banners. Once scanned I cleaned up the image and taught myself how to use layers and add text and backgrounds.  Very challenging but satisfying and worthwhile to do and learn.

The whole process from start to finish took about a week.  The poster has now been printed and published and is now up and it's one of the first things I've done that has been viewed by the public which was challenging and has given me a boost to my confidence to put more of my art work out for people to view. So I will be doing more sketching and artwork to continue to build my confidence. I would love any feedback people may have or even ideas of things to draw to challenge me to draw things I haven't done before.

Thank you for all your support so far and will blog when I can next, hopefully from a computer of some form. 

Speak soon

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