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.

Political Parody

It wasn't long after the Inauguration of the 45th president when I was working on the the poster for Camp Fear and A Full Team, and while I was adding color to the art, the idea for a political cartoon version of the same poster came to me. So here we have the same group of young people, who are now in more symbolic clothing, literally running for their lives from what has become a not so pleasant reality. (The girl with the pink tights is wearing a T-shirt that bears the design of a T-shirt that a friend of mine designed and sold through her company Squirrel Den Studio.) That sinister creature in the tent most definitely ate the dog, so tie-dye shirt dude is utterly beside himself. 

Play Poster: CAMP FEAR

2017's sixth grade play at the school where my husband was teaching at the time was really production of two plays he had written. Camp Fear is about a group of kids at a summer camp who discover a ghost in a shipwreck that they find nearby. A Full Team is about a soccer team at a small school that doesn't have enough players for a team, so they find they have to recruit new players from unlikely sources, like the chess club. The storyline of Camp Fear immediately brought to mind Scooby Doo, so I designed the poster to have the look of a Scooby Doo comic book cover. To create one unified image, I cast the kids from the soccer team in A Full Team as the campers in Camp Fear. Unfortunately, there was no dog sidekick. I think the creature in the tent may have gotten him.

This pencil sketch became the basis of the art in the poster. The color was added in Photoshop, with the sketch as the top layer set on multiply. I like doing this, because then the art can maintain the looseness of the sketch. 

In the play, A Full Team, the actors all needed T-shirts with the soccer team's logo on it. This is what I came up with. The sketch was used as a template in Illustrator, which I used to create the logo. The logo was printed out on iron-on decals, and were then heat-transferred to T-shirts. The logo makes it onto the shirts of the kids in the poster. I changed the design for the girl in the pink tights, because she is the girl from the swim team who was recruited to play on the soccer, so her shirt reflects that.

Play Poster: THE MURDER MYSTERY AT THE MURDER MYSTERY

The 2015 sixth grade play at the school where my husband was teaching at the time was a production of a play by Brian D. Taylor called The Murder Mystery at the Murder Mystery. As you can well imagine, an actual murder happens during the production of murder mystery play and the cast has to solve who did it. Normally, my husband would write the plays the sixth graders performed based on ideas the students suggested. That year, the students wanted to perform an already existing play and this play was available through the Pioneer Drama Service. I loved designing and illustrating this poster. It's still one of my favorites. I used to watch the PBS series Mystery  with my parents and always loved the Edward Gorey animation sequence at the beginning of the program, so it wasn't much of a leap to design an Edward Gorey inspired poster. 

My first step in creating the illustration was to do a very rough sketch with the text already layed out. I find it easier to draw around an already existing text design than trying to design around an already existing drawing.

The next step was this pen and ink drawing. I had a number of Edward Gorey books spread out around my work space so I could mimic the way he handled the pen and ink, as well as the clothing design. Then I scanned the art, and added color to it in photoshop. The drawing was the top layer set on "multiply" so all the white became transparent and all the color layers underneath could be visible.

I had forgotten to add the playwright's credit to the poster so I made sure to add it to the program cover. The programs were always photocopied so all designs had to work in black and white. This one was easy: all I did was use the ink drawing for the art.

Play Poster: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

2016's eighth grade play at the school where my husband was teaching at the time was a production of Much Ado About Nothing set in the 1950s, complete with swing dancing choreographed by a dancer and dance teacher my husband is friends with. My goal was to have a poster that showed all the fun colors of 50s fashions and the movement of swing dancing.

Normally, I sketch out posters by hand, but in this case, I was in such a time crunch that I composed the layout of the poster with the reference images I was going to use. I then sketched it out quickly so I would have a template for when I created the art using Illustrator. Much to my surprise, many people loved this poster. I was surprised because it's not one of my favorites.

Play Poster: MACBETH

This year's 8th grade play at my husband's school was a version of Macbeth set in the Roaring 20's. The entire set and the costumes were all black and white. The only red was Macbeth's red hat, the three witches' red lipstick and the bloody red glove. I decided to design the poster in an Art Deco style, but limiting it to the colors of the set and costumes.

Here's the thumbnail sketch of the poster.

 I can't even think of starting anything unless I do one of these.

The art on the poster is always a combination of a hand done pencil drawing 

and colorization in photoshop. Here is the pencil drawing I used.

Play Poster: THE TEMPEST

I made this poster for the 8th grade play my husband put on with his students at the beginning of the month. The play was supposed to be on March 8th but then it was postponed due to a tempest of snow and slush that caused a snow day. It was held on March 12th, when there was another tempest, that day it was one of wind and rain.

For this poster, I made some line drawings which I scanned and then colored in Photoshop using either scanned paper textures or colors mixed in Photoshop.

PLAY POSTER: A Crown of Ivy

It's that time of year again where I design a poster for my husband's student's play performance. Usually, I am given a photo of some of the cast to use on the poster, but this time, the photographer wasn't available. So I had the option of illustrating the poster. It could've been an all type poster but the subject matter of the play (which my husband wrote especially for his 6th grade students) screamed for a more Victorian look. I only had the weekend in which to do it and it's been ages since I've drawn in this way, so I was a little nervous. So I spread some books with art by Arthur Rackham, Tony diTerlizzi and Brian and Wendy Froud on the table for inspiration and got to work. I didn't include a background to keep it simple (and also because I just didn't have the time.) The boy and the fairy are pencil drawings that I scanned, the color was done in Photoshop and the background is a pattern that I keep around for projects like this.

Here's the pencil drawing:

TWELFTH NIGHT POSTER

I just designed this poster for my husband's middle school production of Twelfth Night. I literally did it almost overnight and stayed up way too late. It was quite fun, looking up psychedelic posters, listening to psychedelic music and then hand manipulating the fonts and using colors I like.

Now why is that significant? I've been working for the past year freelance art directing a mass market series of children's books that uses the same font, the same colors and the same look. The poster was anything but that. The art direction has been more time-consuming than I had anticipated, causing my disappearance from the blogosphere. The series is still ongoing and I'm still art directing it, but I'm going to set myself the goal of one blog post per month to give my creative juices an outlet.

Seussical Poster

I disappeared for a little while, didn't I?  One of the things I was doing was working on this poster for the local high school's performance of Seussical. I did all of it: the illustration, the typography and the layout. The director wanted the look to be a combination of Peter Max and Dr. Seuss. The river in the background refers to the Hudson River, on whose banks the city of Peekskill is situated on. It gives the background a groovy look.