I love making posters for shows that our band plays. The other bands seem to get a kick out of my designs as well which is also a lot of fun. One of the best parts is trying to make it conceptual…even though I bet most people don’t really search that hard for the ‘deeper meaning’ in them…doesn’t matter, I know it’s there. In this case, we are playing in Fremont, a hip little community close to the city in Seattle. It has this crazy thing that lives under the bridge…

So cool, and known by everyone in the greater Seattle area, it seems. What better way to let someone know where the band is playing than by identifying it right there. But who wants to just use a picture? Well probably a lot of people, which is cool, but I was going for something different.

This show is on the last day of February, the 28th just before college basketball jumps into March Madness. So the show is called ‘Prelude To March Madness’. It’s obvious now, right? Troll in a basketball uniform!

For this poster I wanted to also try a new technique in Adobe Illustrator that I have been developing. It comes from the way that I draw on paper…often with a ball point pen. Ok, how I doodle. The process of just being very loose and sketchy with the shapes, not over thinking it or worrying too much about being precise. Having a Wacom tablet and stylus helps as drawing this way is very difficult and very rarely looks like organic sketching. I was partly driven to want to have some texture in the work as the Troll Statue is made of concrete…I didn’t want the super clean vector lines.

Basically I just drew the outlines of the border and the troll. Sketched in all of the lines to fill the colored areas, each on their own layer. Once I had that all done I went to a layer in the back and filled in behind the color layers a layer of black scribble lines to set the backdrop. It was actually pretty quick and easy.

Anyhow, I like this one a lot and it’s gotten a great reception and now I have a new style that I will likely use again.

Erik