To start this project I threw myself into research to give me some inspiration and ideas. From the research post before this you can see that I decided to design a poster for a Jazz Evening. To be honest it was the choice that seemed most interesting to me and I thought it would be a good choice for me as I want to be able to create illustrations that feel a little more dynamic – as I mentioned in part 2. Jazz and dynamic imagery seem to go hand in hand.

I did my research, created my mood board and made a mind map. I looked at all the imagery I had gathered and went from there – I also asked my husband what comes to mind when I say ‘Jazz’ or ‘Jazz Evening’. I also looked at some videos of jazz musicians as I wanted to really get a feel for what I was creating.

I enjoyed the research aspect of this assignment – particularly looking up jazz posters and their designs. I feel like the research really helped as now I knew more – a poster for a Jazz evening is a big deal – often a work of art in its own right. In fact some of the original posters I looked at had sold at auction for a lot of money! A poster for a jazz night is more than just a print out or a leaflet.

I started making some sketches based off my mind map and using some references photographs I found on google. To be honest, I made a lot of drawings for this! I didn’t know exactly what I wanted my poster to look like so I just kept drawing different things until I found something I liked. I eventually came back to one of my earlier drawings of a man playing a trumpet. I eventually cake up with the idea of him playing the trumpet and the words could look like they were coming out of the end – as though the information was the music. I thought this was the best idea because I thought it was very clear and a musician best represented jazz.

I actually really liked the idea of a lounge singer – I also drew up a thumbnail for this and made a rough sketch in procreate, because I really wanted to pursue the idea! However it just didn’t quite fit what I was wanting to do – I would like to revisit this sketch and finish the drawing in my personal time!

After drawing up my thumbnails I made some notes talking about how I wanted the final piece to look – I definitely wanted to spend more time on the planning of this assignment because not planning thoroughly enough had been my downfall on a couple of exercises during part 3!

I noticed when doing my research that a lot of the jazz posters had this silhouette style of musicians. You could see that they were men and that they were playing instruments but they were quite abstract and didn’t have defined faces – I wanted to do this in my poster too. Although it was going to be a modern illustration made digitally I wanted it to also have the feel of the older posters. I thought that also fit well with jazz, a lot of the culture is about looking back and keeping jazz alive, it felt fitting to do it with the imagery as well.

For the background I wanted a painterly abstract feel – I wanted the image to feel dynamic and energetic and I felt that this kind of movement in the background would help portray this. I made a colour palette before I started as well – I looked at old jazz posters and illustrations and noticed they all had a limited palette and that everything within the illustration kept to that. I made a palette based on the colours in some of the posters I had seen and worked with that throughout the piece. The colours had quite a vintage feel – I am really glad I took the time to choose the colours specifically before I started on the final illustration because I think it really made all the difference whilst working. Planning my colour choices will definitely be something I do going forward, it made the drawing process more efficient and i think it made for a more polished final piece.

I wanted the background to feel abstract and energetic so I experimented with a few different textured brushes. I settled on the ‘jagged brush’ as it felt very painterly – I liked this as it felt energetic and dynamic like the old posters I looked at.

I made my sketch in procreate – although I knew the figure would be quite minimal in the end I still sketched out the details of his face so that it would look more in proportion at the end – I would have struggled if I tried to draw a blank head with a nose – I tried it in my sketchbook and the scale was way off!

After getting the drawing to a point I was happy with I started drawing and filling in the segments of the figure – mainly block colour but I did use a little bit of shading around his hat and the trumpet using a halftone brush. I did this because it added a little more definition in areas where the colours changed. I created the background as planned using the jagged brush – I was quite free with the strokes and used multiple colours from the palette to create it. I like the way it turned out and it does add a dynamic feel to the image but now I’m looking back I think it could have been even more dynamic!

For the text I used a strong block font (impact). I wanted it to be bold and fit in with the strong block colour aspect of the illustration. I still wanted the text to stand out however and I think it worked well. I actually typed each letter individually twice, so I could place some at an angle and change the opacity to make it look more three dimensional. I think it worked really well. One criticism I do have about the text however is the spacing! Even though the letters are not linear and are up and down the spacing between them is off to the point of it being noticeable. The ‘J’ is actually further away than the rest of them.

I want to know more about lettering – fonts, spacing etc. I have booked myself onto a course with Joby Carter (signwriter/artist at Carters Steam Fair). I will write an entry in my learning log once I complete the course with what I have learnt. I wanted to learn how to do it by hand rather than digitally, because I would really like to be able to draw my own letters!

I am happy with the overall finished piece. I think that if I were to do this kind of thing again it would be helpful for me to have an understanding of vectors and how they work so that I could create a minimal posterior image a little better – I think that working in that way would help the final image seem more refined and professional. This piece was quite experimental for me and I have never tried anything like it before – in both style and subject matter. I came back to the piece a few days later and made a de-saturated version – just to see what it would look like! I quite like it, it looks a lot more old fashioned! I do still prefer the original – I just wanted to experiment and see if the image worked in black and white due to the minimal aspect of it – I think it did.

I definitely feel a sense of gratification when I finished these exercises because in all honesty sometime I do feel overwhelmed by the brief. Working in my sketchbook and with mind maps and mood boards has definitely helped me learn how to kick start the ideas process and how to develop the ideas into a finished piece – keeping up with that through out part 3 has been very helpful. I think at the start of the course I was afraid to make mistakes and wanted everything to feel perfect all the time – now, half way through, I am definitely more comfortable with making mistakes because I do feel like I learn a lot through them and where to change my process next time to prevent this. I am enjoying going back over my work and seeing the process from brief to final piece because you can see the development and refinement happening as I go along. I am definitely more comfortable with being more open and more spontaneous with my sketchbook work and that definitely helps later down the line!