Latin Jazz

Design a poster/flyer for a concert; letter size.



Few things about this:

The saxophone is THE hardest instrument I have ever outlined, and I've outlined my fair share (ok, only a few like...13).

Let's start with the concept, since that's what it's all about eh? At first I didn't know where I wanted to go with this, I was thinking of maybe illustrating one of those old school jazz players in a silhouette with the whole old school get up and the hat, think New Orleans.

I came up with a few concepts, but...after a while (after some comments from my teacher) I asked, what separates my concept from others? So to give it a spin than, I started thinking of maybe doing Bossa Nova, Fusion, something different. I settled with Latin Jazz.

In the end, it didn't come out quite as I had envisioned, came rather cold and not "Latino" at all, but time was up so, that up there is the final product.

As for the technique, I was messing around with gradients and transparencies that we had just learned. was going to find a way to incorporate it into this final render, but didn't have time to, and my layers were a mess so I couldn't find too many things, I didn't know what was linked to what, some masks flipped out on me, and until I find a way to patch shapes and mesh them together (couldn't find it in pathfinder), floating shapes in the abyss would have to do.

I also experimented with the wrap tools (can you tell?) and smooth tools to get the clean cuts instead of messing to much with the pen tool. Some parts may not look to crisp since that's where the floating shapes were placed to cover those binding "tentacles" and overlapping effects.

Logos were taken from brandsoftheworld. Except for the Miami Dade County one, that one wasn't up there except for a very cheap knock off of called "Wade County"...get it? as in Dwayne Wade form the Miami Heat, eh? eh? no? alright. The shape wasn't even right, at least if it was right I could put in the letters, bah.

Not very satisfied with this piece, at all, but I'm learning. Next project should be fun: Create a superhero! extra credit if you animate yourself!

Prof told us to outline everything from fingers to teeth and eyelids if we were thinking of importing this into flash, which I might (even though I'm not a big fan of flash animations since they ALWAYS look so cheap). I included some rejected rendered concepts.