Category: Assignment 3

The last step was to create my finished poster. I decided to do it digitally because I wanted to be really experimental with laying bright colours over a black background which can be difficult to accomplish working traditionally, and just technical limitations that my scanner only works at A4, and I needed to produce the poster at A3.

While working on the poster, I flattened the image without thinking when I was working on the text so I accidentally lost my layer information, so I can’t showcase my process as I went along. But here is the finished poster, with accompanying text. I just made up a date and venue.

I had a lot of difficulty throughout. I struggled to get the line art to work with the colouring that I was going for, and I really struggled with composition. You can see I moved the pianist from one side to the other, which I think improves the overall flow. I like the essence of the poster, I think it’s eye-catching from a distance and I like the colours and composition. I just think the overall delivery, the challenge of working where some parts are drawn in negative and others aren’t, the complicated light and shade which doesn’t necessarily adhere to any given light source… It all could do with better delivery.

Reflecting on notes for the future, I think I took on too many experimental areas at once.

Before I sign off I wanted to do one quick thing. It being a poster I wanted to see a physical version of it, and I thought it would be a nice way to close off this section. I went to a copy shop and got it printed out in A3.

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.

Part three’s assignment has me making a poster for a music event. Out of the options available I chose a Jazz evening.

Taking a lesson from the exercise on abstract art, I made a playlist of some of my favourite jazz albums to listen to while I worked through the assignment.

One of the most useful items I came across while researching this assignment is a book I found in my local library (which is becoming quite a treasure trove for the course), The Power of the Poster, besides having several examples of beautiful posters that served as great inspiration, it also explained a lot about the history of the poster as a commercial and artistic medium. Here are some of my favourite illustrations from the book.

I love the loose hand drawn line work and composition of the Supremes’ poster. The stark contrasting colours for the Copenhagen jazz festival are very effective.

I did several Google image searches for different jazz posters and found some really fantastic results. I bookmarked some of my favourites to use for inspiration.

I brainstormed some ideas in the form of a spider diagram and some loose written notes for what I wanted to do for my poster.

At this stage I came up with what I thought was an interesting idea. A few years ago I went to a jazz bar in Madrid, and it was a really lovely holiday. For whatever reason I have this very strong visual memory of looking up at the stage and watching the band play. In front of the stage was a mirrored column, and in the column I could see this woman sitting at the bar watching the band. I just found that moment to be a really pleasing composition, with the stage split up by this woman who had been inserted into my view. Anyway, I wanted to see if I could come up with a poster reminiscent of this memory, just to make it a bit more personal.

Next I wanted to gather reference images of some of my favourite musicians. At this stage the direction I wanted to go was slowly taking form, and I started separating my references into groups. I matched like images and printed some out, and then made some colour swatches and fabric cuttings. I pasted them to some black sugar paper to create a moodboard. I decided on the colour combinations I wanted and separated them on the board to see how they worked.

There was a few different musicians and movements I was considering. One thing I really enjoy, and am constantly ranting about whenever I get the chance, is Japanese jazz. There’s a lot of Japanese jazz musicians I really love, but especially Hiromi Uehara, Toshiko Akiyoshi and Indigo Jam Unit. As the story goes, the Japanese began to develop an interest in jazz after WWII, but early attempts at emulation were sort of dismissed as uninspired and derivative on the world stage. Out of a genuine love of the genre and a strong desire for respect from their contemporaries, an incredibly vibrant and experimental jazz scene exploded in Japan. Here’s an interview conducted by the University of Michigan of acclaimed pianist and band leader Toshiko Akiyoshi on becoming a jazz musician.

I was ready to start developing the ideas that I had, so I started some thumbnail work in my sketchbook. It was fun to combine some of my favourite jazz musicians in the same composition.

One of my ideas was to do a portrait of Akiyoshi in ink, however I thought the idea was a bit simple and wouldn’t necessarily convey jazz evening to a passerby. One of the things I’ve noticed that I’ve been gravitating towards is these sort of complicated ensemble arrangements (see the exercise on image development). I wanted to try and do something like this myself from scratch, especially since concept art is an avenue of art I’d like to go down in my future career. I wanted an arrangement of musicians, kind of cascading down the image, bifurcated by this piercing image of a female lead singer. This is what I tried to portray in my thumbnails.

It was really challenging to get it right, with so many elements that all need to coalesce into one composition. Choosing my two favourite thumbnails I got to work making my line visuals.

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References

Timmers, M. (1998) The Power of the Poster. UK: Butler and Tanner.