I chose to design a poster for a jazz evening, and started
brainstorming by using a spider diagram, then I made a mood board from images I
had collected, finding others through an internet search and also in a book at a house I was sitting (The Story of Jazz, Bop and Beyond by Bergerot and
Merlin; published by Thames and Hudson/New Horizons).
I
wanted to make a fairly simple design in terms of line, taking a musical
instrument as the theme, and to keep the palette limited too, I particularly
liked the combination of black, white, red and turquoise.
And
chose to develop the double bass and trumpet drawings into line visuals; the
double bass is actually my favourite musical instrument and I like the angle
and perspective of the photo of Charles
Mingus in The Story of Jazz book as it exaggerates the big and bulbous form and
has humour and warmth.
Line
visuals
I
was thinking of using charcoal as I wanted a dark, rough looking effect and giving
the text a hand drawn quality to match this, and was further inspired by these
two posters, one of which I found on facebook
the
other of which I came across while on holiday in the south of France; drawn by
a lovely man called Denis Carriere who has a canal side atelier in the
beautiful village of Le Somail where they have weekly jazz concerts.
Unfortunately my visit didn’t coincide with the jazz but Denis very kindly
explained to me how he makes his sketches in charcoal, fixes them and then adds
oil washes for colour. He makes hand cut stencils for the lettering and has also
used this method for a series of Vietnamese street scenes which hes is to
exhibit shortly. His atelier was absolutely stuffed with work; beautifully
rendered watercolours of the canal as well as this rougher style. Really
inspiring. He has a website www.deniscarriere.com but I’ve not been
able to access it....will keep trying.
I
also came across this Crosby, Stills and Nash album cover on Spotify, which
uses a stencil typeface to good effect and has a nice rough texture to the
background.
I
set about making my colour visual first by exploring my store of scanned papers,
choosing one from a music book and altering the colour in photoshop and another with torn edges as a background.
I
then used photoshop to cut out the lines of my line visual, setting the layer
mode to multiply and before cleaning it up decided to try pasting it on to my
background.
I was really taken with the print–like effect of the dirty line visual background and thought that the drawing itself worked well, so I decided at this stage just to tidy it up a bit and not to redraw the image.
I
chose a stencil type face in red for ‘JAZZ’ to make it stand out, distorting it
slightly and adding a subtle effect to make it look more hand drawn. I chose
the other type face because it looked to me like a lower case version of the
stencil and placed it outside the confines of the image and then cropped the
edges a little.
I
love seeing many copies of the same poster pasted next to each other on walls,
especially when they go a bit tatty, so I played with multiple versions on a
single poster
Actually
the tatty edges work less well for me now the image is multiplied so my
favourite of these is this one. And of course if the overall size is A3 then
the image size will be smaller, so maybe less readable....
Rather than adding a date I decided to add 'every week', again in the stencil typeface but lightly coloured and translucent. I really wanted to make the text run diagonally at the same angle as the line under the f holes of the bass but I couldn't work out how to rotate it in photoshop. Anyway, I like the way it looks and the repetition of the text and the poster reinforce the idea of a weekly repeated concert.
On
reflection:
The
whole ‘visual magpie’ thing is really important, as even when the ‘official’
research period of a project is done there are always opportunities to get more
inspiration and ideas...always.
It’s
also great to be building up a store of textures and patterns to use.
Ideally
I would have cut a JAZZ stencil by hand and spray painted it over a charcoal
drawing coloured with acrylic paint but for various reasons it had taken me two
months to get past the line visual stage of this assignment so I opted for
shortcuts, which I think work pretty well.
I like the aged, hand-made feel of the poster and the subtle use of colour, and I think the red JAZZ would call the viewer's attention well.
I like the aged, hand-made feel of the poster and the subtle use of colour, and I think the red JAZZ would call the viewer's attention well.
Tutor feedback: lacks contrast, double base would benefit from shading on the sides and underneath and more detail on the bridge.
So I redrew the base and put the drawing through the same photoshop process
so this is the new final poster, which is much clearer, more interesting and vibrant for the update.
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