I love to sketch. I primarily draw people but I also love experimenting with fluid designs, things that aren't really anything but become meaningful after I'm finished with them. After drawing the main design featured in my poster, I spent some time analyzing it, choosing what it looked like and could be used for. I finally decided that what it looked like was a stream of billowing smoke, as if it was coming out of a chimney somewhere. That's how I came up with the idea for my Contemporary Arts Festival of London poster. I used the 'contemporary' design to represent an every day thing in an interesting way. In a way it's almost as if it's an art piece in itself that it being showcasted via poster for the event.

I'm sure that there is an actual Contemporary Arts Festival that goes on in London, however for the sake of the project I made up the name, date and website. 

I began by scanning my drawing into Photoshop, where I had to adjust the levels so that the background was more white and there were no shadows and the design itself stood out a little more. I then opened the image in Illustrator and live traced it so that it got rid of the texture in the background and made the lines more uniform and fluid. I copied this new image back into Photoshop, and worked with it from there. The smaller designs I decided to add later because I felt that the poster was a little empty with just the design in the middle. I processed them the same way I did for the first design.

After deciding on a colour palette and filling in most of the free space within the design (I left some out to give it a 'do it yourself colouring book sort of feel', I chose a font that I thought fit the theme and added inner shadows to it. I also added a faint drop shadow to the main design. Lastly I added a gradient map to the entire image to give the project a more uniform blend of colours (and I just love how they look).

The overall process wasn't overly complicated for me, although it was definitely time consuming. My biggest issue came from the fact that after I was completely finished with the project, exported it and changed it to 100 dpi (I like working with 300) that I realized I had gotten the canvas size wrong. I had been working on an 8x11 image the entire time when it was supposed to be 8x10. I had to go back into Photoshop, resize and re-edit all my spacing, sizing and even skew the design a bit. I was afraid of losing quality so I had to take various steps to prevent it from degrading. In the end I think it turned out really well and I'm happy with the results. 

Contemporary Art, in my mind, is loud and bold and doesn't hide. I think I represented that well in my poster, and got the message across with well placed typography.