I still need to post my pictures from the awesome Woods and Real Estate show that I went to at the Duke Coffeehouse, but I wanted to put this design I made up first because I spent a lot of time on it, and whether or not it wins the Cat’s Cradle Old Ceremony Poster Contest or now I’m proud of it. And since the deadline is over, I feel fine about putting it out here.
A little explanation for the design, it started as a scan from an old Halloween photo layout for Vector magazine, the only current Vector I could find was for the British Science Fiction Association but that might be a source of imagery for my next design! I went with the photocopied kind of rough look to give it kind of a punk feel but the overall idea was to make it feel like it was something otherworldly or out of time with our own world. As I developed this idea more I decided to completely remove the original photos from the layout (I’ll post a few of the original photos in forthcoming posts) and replace them with old pictures of fantastic creatures and such.
I spent a lot of time combing through Vintage Printable, and I highly recommend this site if anyone needs to find interesting images or just wants to look at some cool stuff. I guess the leopard I used isn’t exactly a fantastic creature, but I thought it looked so cool as the symbol for the cat’s cradle, especially since their normal logo is just a house cat. Figuring out which images to use for the double shots was hard, originally the idea was to sort of have two different triptychs which were also tied into the central graphic but then I remembered I was making a poster for a rock show and tried not to layer on the meaning too too deep and make sure things were eye catching first.
The dragon fit in the 2 picture frames so well, I knew I needed to mirror it on the other side to make it more aesthetically pleasing, it took me forever to find another image which looked good split like that and also loosely fit the theme. I ended up deciding on another fantastic creature from another old alchemy book oddly enough. I really liked how the beard matched the angel of death and also the peacock feather like wings the creature had.
The final touch was re-imaging the whole thing as page torn from “Aural Connoisseur” magazine, and if you’ll note the page number of the magazine is the same date as the show, I included this hoping that subliminally at least it would help people remember when the show was.
I hope all of you like it and I’ll be posting some of the inspiration images.
And if you’re in a band that needs any kind of flyer/poster/cover artwork done, let me know!
