Sketch: JOB HUNT

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.

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.

SKETCH: Mermaid

Just a cute little mermaid floating around.

She ended up becoming a tattoo on my left forearm.

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.

Illustration Friday: EGG

This weeks topic arrived in my in-box right before Easter. Making an image utilizing an Easter egg was just too obvious so I decided to do something with a dragon egg instead. The fairy was taking a cat nap on her mushroom seat when she was awoken by the sound of the dragon hatching. I included some other spring imagery, note the buds in frame one have opened up in frame two.

I had wanted to color this but I had waited far too long to get going on this. Stay tuned for a color version, I hope!

Illustration Friday: SWIM

I learned this song when I was at Girl Scout day camp when I was 8 years old and I always loved this song since then. I love to swim and this song is a fun song to sing because you just keep on singing it, it doesn't really end until you want it to or someone asks you to end it. Swimming is like that for me too, I can just keep on swimming and swimming until I want to stop or someone asks me to.

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: