Leaders of the Shift

Working with clients as well as other artists requires a lot of give and take to create something everyone can be happy with. During my work for the band Leaders of the Shift I was asked to recreate a poster that they had previously commissioned and use another artist’s rendering of the band.

 
 

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Original Poster

The original poster was a 8.5”x11” and featured hand drawn backgrounds, text and band image. The background would need to be recreated as a vector image. This would help make the background patterns cleaner and more exact. And the text would need an actual font that I would try to match up with the existing as best I could.

I was also given new drawing of the band as well as new text for the event. Because of the amount of text and the overall design I pushed for a larger 11”x17” format to give the design some breathing room.


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band artwork cleanup

The new band artwork larger and more detailed. It only needed a little more contrast and some minor edge cleanup.


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Recreating the background

Using Adobe Illustrator I was quickly able to recreate the background image. I mirrored many of the elements so there was no doubt about it’s symmetry. It was a little tedious overall, but the extra effort made future edits to adjust to text placement quick and painless.


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Adding artwork

I layered in the band artwork giving it a white outline to keep them from getting lost in the busy background. Everything fit together pretty nicely so there wasn’t much extra work to do here.


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Recreating the font

Although the previous posters font was hand drawn it did have a specific style that it seem to pull from. I searched for, and found, a similar font which was bold enough to handle the warping I applied to it.


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PUTTING it all together

All together its a much better poster than the original. It’s eye catching and a little overwhelming, but the band liked it and I think it has the psychedelic vibe they were going for.