17" x 11", ink and digital, 1999
The front left breast of the t-shirt:
Back to the posters.
I was approached to do the poster for Markham Youth Theatre's production of Hair a short time before they were to do City of Angels (by different friends/directors). Despite not being a huge fan of musicals, I do enjoy making posters, so the project was a lot of fun --especially since I had a lot of leeway in the design.
For Hair, I decided to heavily base the design and illustration on the art nouveau stylings of Alphonse Mucha, whom I adore greatly (and stole from quite obviously). The layout and graphic background is straight outta Mucha, with the young woman in the foreground being from some found reference and her hair given the Mucha treatment, what with those curls and all. The illustration was done in ink, then scanned, then coloured (and the text was laid out) digitally.
I also designed the t-shirts for the production and, once again, stole a bit from Alphonse for the MYT logo on the front. I still have all my shirts -although the screened ink is cracking from more than a decade of wear and tear.
The back of the t-shirt:
Why art nouveau rather than something more obviously from the 60s? Probably because I saw a lot of art nouveau being referenced in a lot of 1960s designs anyway (kind of like you can see art deco in the 50s and then again in the 80s if you know where to look).
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