Play Poster: THE SEUSSIFICATION OF ROMEO AND JULIET

In 2017, the eighth grade play at the school where my husband was teaching at the time was a production of The Seussification of Romeo and Juliet. He had seen a performance of this play at another school and thought it would be perfect for his students that year. For me, this meant that the poster was going to be done in the style of Dr. Seuss. Layout-wise, it was the most challenging because I needed to get all the components of the illustration to work with the text that was to go on the poster. 

Instead of creating one single illustration, I first sketched out the the background. Then I sketched out  Romeo, Juliet, and two Barbaloots without any regard to scale. Drawing characters in a Dr. Seuss style is not natural for me, so it was easier to just draw them at any size, with the plan of resizing them in Photoshop.

The next step was to incorporate the characters into the background, resizing them to fit the space.

After that, I placed the sketch into the layout, resized it, and moved around parts of the art in to work with the type. Once that was done, I printed out the image and did an ink drawing over it on layout bond paper.

 This is the inked drawing that I scanned and colored in Photoshop. This poster ended up being the last one I did for that school. The curriculum for the classes my husband taught changed the following school year, and he was no longer able to put on plays with his students. He ended up moving on to another school district after that.