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