Shoestring Magic 2: More Poster Art Tinkering

by Jordan Morris: Producer / Designer, The Duchess of Malfi directed by Bernard Hopkins

UPDATE! See the bottom of the page

Similar to my first attempt, I recently sat down and took another stab at creating some interesting typography (stylized text) that I will then use for our poster. I started with better equipment this time, assembling several good knives, a few sheets of white poster board, a metal ruler, a really good eraser and a mechanical pencil.

I started by printing off the words "THE" , "DUCHESS" , "OF" and "MALFI" in several sizes in a font I was fairly happy with. Then I taped the words together in a grouping that I liked and then taped that cluster down to the poster board so it wouldn't shift. I traced (sort of) the printed letters onto the poster board by using an empty mechanical pencil and pressed hard enough to leave a clear impression behind. Then I penciled it in, but this time I significantly altered the actual font, modifying every letter, and completely redesigning the
"D", "H", "O", "I" "A" and the "S's". I was much happier with this version than what I created previously.

Shoestring Magic 2: More Poster Art Tinkering - The Magic of Malfi

There's the finished cut. And you can see clearly that I'm using some pretty low-tech methods for creating depth and detail
for the actual letters. It's really simple. Just cut your design out of one sheet and suspend it over another uncut sheet.
Sometimes I put the two sheets close together, sometimes further apart. I goofed with lighting and a flash occasionally, but mostly it just came down to camera angle. I'm not satisfied yet, but I'm getting pretty close. Here's some interesting examples:

In the first few photos, I'd actually drawn a little skull onto the poster board as the dot of the 'I'. Then I created a paper version like this. Then I cut out the eye and nose cavities and finally abandoned that idea altogether.	Here it is with a typical dot over the 'I' I really like the IDEA of the skull, but I fear it may be too heavy-handed and obvious.
The text in this combination sort of looks metallic somehow.	This one really doesn't look like cut paper at all. (To me anyway)

And there are dozens of other variations as well. Now I'm going to try to 'back light' the whole thing and see what that looks like. So, that's throwing light up from below, through the text, which is exactly the opposite of what I've tried so far. Stay tuned.

UPDATE!
Rob Cousins, the visual artist responsible for the awesome faux brickwork used on our Last Days of Judas Iscariot set from last fall has decided to lend me his skills and is now on board to lend a helping hand. We've decided to explore a few options, but want to keep the poster as 'white' as possible. He's created a test image using a lot of red (which I like), but we're going back to a primarily all-white design to see if we can make that work first. Stay tuned.

Here's some of the other images being worked with...

A Satisfied Tenant is Our Greatest Asset!

* Farhi Holdings is a proud sponsor of
the London Community Players production of The Duchess of Malfi

Our stage production is
Executive Produced
by the
London Community Players
and will run at their home venue,
The Palace Theatre
in February 2011
.

JordanMorris	Latest page update: made by JordanMorris , Nov 28 2010, 12:10 PM EST (about this update About This Update Edited by JordanMorris 107 words added 4 images added view changes - complete history)
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