Picton Picturefest Afterparty

8.5" x 11", ink and digital, 2011

For the past couple of months, we'd been working very hard to upgrade our art barn at Small Pond Arts so that it would be more versatile and better overall. There is now a nice cement floor currently curing in there and it'll be ready very soon, with plenty of time to spare before its first official use on July 10.

Small Pond is hosting the Picton Picturefest Youth Retreat and, to close out the big fest, also hosting the Afterparty featuring music by Calgary's Kris Ellestad, who'll be performing on our aforementioned fresh new barn floor. We're very excited to be such a big part of Picturefest and this excitement carried over into inspiring me to try something new for the Afterparty poster illustration.

Conceptually straightforward, I referenced my own photos and photos online of singers with guitars, old style microphones, and classic Bolex film cameras, and combined and re-combined them until I was satisfied with the arrangement and composition. The "new" thing I wanted to try was a different way of inking the drawing; I used a regular ballpoint pen because I wanted a very loose look with a "dead" line (a line with no variation in width) throughout. Then I scanned the drawing and messed around in Photoshop with textures I've been collecting for a while now to achieve that grungy, worn, screen-printed look.

The dimensions above refer to the original line drawing of the camera-headed singer I did on a piece of regular copy paper.

And here's the final poster layout:

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