Sketch Club Poster Design

A couple of weeks back, I started to run a Tuesday night drawing session for students and staff. To help promote it, I decided to create a poster and logo for print and a Facebook presence. I toyed around with lots of ideas but settled on a simple illustration of costumed characters armed with drawing equipment. Most of the drawing sessions consist of a model in costume so this idea seemed like a simple fit. I gathered a bunch of reference for characters and the background and set to work.

After roughing out a bunch of characters in my sketch book, I had a basic line up and set about comping together the poster layout in Photoshop. I scanned in my rough characters, made some adjustments and changed some characters completely before printing them out at a larger scale and cleaning up the rough designs for each character. This is where I refined the designs and poster layout beyond the very rough stage. I also mocked up the background artwork on a separate page and scanned it into Photoshop. 

With the characters cleaned up and the layout scanned in, I set about comping the poster and experimenting with type and logo designs. The initial mock-up above has a Led Zeppelin inspired type face which I ended up abandoning for something simpler and suitable for the box frame limitations of the Face Book page layout.

With the layout working, traditionally inking the characters and background artwork was next. I used the Faber-Castell PITT artist pens which include some brush pens which I had wanted to try out for a while. The inking style was influenced by Skottie Young and Bill Watterson. 

For me, the traditional inking process is still faster than digital inking partially because of the scale I'm working at and the fact that you can't screw it up and that pressure leads to more focus and less meandering over lines and placement.

The logo design needed to change from the initial mock-up, so I set about coming up with an alternative. I settled on a mixture of hand written script and digital type faces.
I'd seen plenty of similar examples and had not set about to reinvent the wheel for a simple poster. I sat down for about an hour and wrote out the word 'Sketch' as many types in as many variations I could think of, then narrowed down the selection and settled on 10 that I was happy with. These where brought into Photoshop and comped together with digital type faces.

The inked artwork and new logo design were finally brought into Photoshop and painted digitally using some simple brushes to create a flat opaque design with graphic shadows and highlights. The last step was to colour the Logo design in a colour that sat kindly with the illustration.