Assignment three: A poster. Part two: Mock-ups

For this section of the assignment I needed to make some mock-ups in preparation for my final artwork.

The first line visual I did was of a saxophonist with this vertical strip coming down with a woman at a mic stand. I thought that there was potential with this idea based on the thumbnail I had done earlier.

I’m not crazy about the design. I feel like the movement of the piece is broken up in an unappealing way by the vertical strip. Maybe there’s a way to get it to work but I wasn’t seeing it.

The second design was a broader ensemble piece. I had a few of these thumbnails to choose from.

I thought this one had potential. I wanted the figures to just be slightly moved around a bit. With this piece I felt like the colour choices would be crucial. It was hard for me to visualise what the coloured version would look like.

In preparation for the colour visual I cut strips of tracing paper and copied each of the characters so that I could just move them a little bit here and there to tidy up the image.

Based on the moodboard earlier I decided on using a cyan/magenta combination. In the final piece I wanted the background to be black, but for the purposes of the colour visual I left it white. I just used markers to give an impression of what I wanted.

I wrote a few notes on the sheet. I think the left figure is now standing out too much from the rest, but it’s difficult to tell. I had a pretty good idea of what combinations I wanted now. The idea was to kind of do the central figure in negative.

The last step was to do the final artwork.