Chantuese Lily

It's finally finished! I created this poster for a super-talented singer named Lily. I designed her Dreamer EP cover a couple of years ago. This project was a lot of fun to work on, as I love creating anything relating to music. It's a bit different to my usual illustrations as I usually focus on drawing just the face, but this time I have drawn the entire body as well as background details. It's good to challenge yourself and try different things.

I did two colour variations, the client loved both and decided they wanted to use both versions in the future. 

Which version do you like better - blue or purple?

Take the Power Back

Hmmm, where's the next place we should take over?

Happy New Year everyone! I always like to do a bit of decluttering and get rid of old sketches and paper that I have accumulated over the years. It's also nice to look back on old work that I might have forgotten like this old illustration of Rage Against the Machine.

The original thumbnail sketch is below. This illustration was done years ago, so while I can definitely see it's in my illustration style the technique is not quite refined yet.

And I still love listening to RATM!

Currently reading: Modern Dog

I'm currently reading Modern Dog: 20 Years of Poster Art. 20 years is a long time to be creating art, and there's some awesome posters in this book, but I also love reading the often funny stories behind how the artwork was created.

Hands Up Poster #2

The second Hands Up poster in the series (see the first one here) I did as part of my Jump Mentorship.

Rock on!

Hands Up poster

New stuff! This is the latest piece of work I have completed as part of my Jump Mentorship. My brief was to make up an event with a theme that would work across a series of posters, flyers, and promotional material. I invented the fictional 'Hands Up' event as a series of uni band nights, giving an opportunity for talented young bands and musicians to play in front of live audiences and improve their skills. Each event that is held relates to a genre of music and features bands who play that genre of music.

My idea was for the series of posters to show different types of hand in all kinds of poses. They serve to connect the visuals with the event name 'Hands Up' as well as being a recognizable element that can be carried across a variety of mediums.

The last time I drew a hand on its own was the Zombie Turkey Hand I did last year (check it out here) and I had heaps of fun drawing this one. Maybe I have a fascination with drawing green hands??

Lower Dens poster

Here is the second project I have completed as part of my Jump mentorship. My brief was to design a poster for the band Lower Dens with a focus on abstract imagery. I usually like to draw people, so this was a great project for me to focus on typography and textures. Creating the 3D typography was much easier than I thought it would be - all I can say is that the 3D tool in Illustrator is the boss!

My original sketch and rough composition

Poster sneak peek

Here is a peek at the latest project that I am working on as part of my Jump Mentorship.

Lana Del Rey poster

I can finally reveal the rest of my illustration, after the sneaky peek of the eyes I posted earlier this week. I love Lana Del Rey's music, when I first heard her album Born to Die I was blown away and listened to it repeatedly.

This is my entry into a competition to design a concert poster for Lana's three night performance dates at the El Rey Theatre. Lana has a sort of vintage Hollywood glamour, so I wanted to evoke a 1950s silver screen siren feel to it. A lot of things (good and bad) have been written about her on the web, Twitter, etc, but in the 1950s newspapers were the main medium for tabloid scoops of famous figures. This led me to create the background with a newspaper feel of headlines taken from her lyrics.

I always like to push myself and try new things, and with this poster I had a go at adding some texture and grit to it.

Gritty texture to achieve a newspaper feel

And as with all projects, I started off with research and creating a mood board of pics.

R. Black

The book comes with 3D glasses as a few of his illustrations have been rendered 3D.

R. Black is the man behind some of the most memorable gig posters in the past few years. The book Futura documents his style of creating vector illustrations that are often quite dark.

There is an intro by Brian Ewing (remember I posted a review about his book here?), but there isn't much else in terms of interviews or notes to read. Which is a shame, since I like to read about the people behind the artworks and I like to know how they got started, etc. I did find an interesting interview with him online here, where he talks about his work.

Nevertheless, the work is AMAZING and as a visual history it is an awesome book. I definitely recommend it!

Warpaint poster

Something new! A while ago, I posted about being selected to participate in the Australia-wide Jump Mentorship Program. I have always aimed in my career to head towards doing designs for music-related projects, and part of my mentorship with WBYK involves them setting projects for me that relate to music.

My first project was to design an Australian tour poster for Los Angeles indie band Warpaint. Their music takes a few listens to get to know, and the overall feeling is very dark, dreamy and hypnotizing (I recommend checking out their music! My favourite song is Undertow). To get that sprawling, atmospheric feeling in my illustration I tried something a bit different from my usual style and used blobby shapes of colour instead of outlining everything in black.

To do the Warpaint text, I painted it then scanned it in. It actually took longer than I thought to get the perfect letters!

Just Like Being There

Just Like Being There (Promo) from Johanna Goldstein on Vimeo.

So excited to see this documentary when it gets released.

American Artifact

I love gig posters. Hands down, they are one of my favourite things in the world. Recently I was casually browsing the internets when I discovered there was a documentary about gig posters called American Artifact that featured some of the most awesome artists in the world. I was like, "NO WAY!"

So I bought it (even though I was a tiny bit hesitant at the price of nearly $40 for a DVD). And I can say that it is the most inspiring thing that I've watched for a long, long time. It just reminds me of why I got so excited about gig posters in the first place. There's a real DIY feel throughout the film, as many of the posters artists quit their jobs and started doing what they loved, even though they were struggling financially.



I love how Frank Kozic says that his original goal when making posters was to get people to say "How can this exist? Who the f*ck made this?"

One of the poster artists featured is Emek, who just churns out amazing poster after amazing poster. The video below was from the bonus disc showing deleted scenes and it gives some insight into his process - he uses fineliners to draw insane amounts of detail. He definitely is the thinking man's poster artist.



If you are into gig posters, this is a seriously awesome doco.

A night at the museum

Access all areas!

Last night I went to the opening launch of the AC/DC: Australia's Family Jewels exhibition at the WA Museum. I managed to score two VIP tix for the event, and I'm so glad I did because they had an awesome tribute band playing beforehand as well as a bagpipe player leading everyone into the exhibition. Members of Bon Scott's family were there as well as people from Alberts Music (AC/DC's original recording label).

A photo wall where you could post a note. I wrote: Angus Young, my high-school crush ♥

The exhibit had personal photos, handwritten lyrics, letters to Bon's wife Irene, gig posters and Angus' school uniform. They even had a huge screen at the back playing loud music and concert footage from Donnigton. Plus there were smaller screens playing interviews with the band from the early days. For an AC/DC nut like me (see this post) it was rock'n'roll heaven!

Gig posters, clothing, original Dirty Deeds album artwork and backstage passes.

I was reading a few of Bon's letters and what really struck me was that even in the very early days of AC/DC he was aiming for the top. There was no doubt in his mind that AC/DC were going to make it big one day.

Anyway, it was an awesome exhibition and you could tell so much effort was made to design it. I went to so many school excursions to the museum as a kid, and I never would have expected them to come up with something so entertaining like this. After seeing this one, I would love for the WA Museum to show more pop culture exhibitions!

Dan Mumford

I am totally loving the work of London-based illustrator Dan Mumford. I first spotted his work on the album cover of Homesick by A Day to Remember, checked out his website and was blown away by some of the coolest work ever. On his website he mentions how he creates his work:

With pencils, pens, and the wonders of photoshop. All my work is either hand rendered or created with the use of a tablet.

Amazing!

Thunder!

 
Today is Angus Young's birthday. Yep, the devilish schoolkid turns 56 (!)

I was so totally nutso about AC/DC when I was in high school. I listened to them constantly, even listening to grainy bootlegs of live recordings. Hanging out with people, I would tell them obscure facts about the band, regaling how they had to cross the Nullarbor to travel to gigs (though I was often met with glassy-eyed stares). Classes at school were an opportunity to practice drawing the AC/DC logo in the margins of my school paper. And whenever there was a project at school where you had some freedom in choosing the topic, well, I didn't even have to think about what to base the project on.

It was about this time that I discovered the Art of Modern Rock book, profiling the work of gig poster artists. I was hooked. One day in Art class, we were given the project of designing a movie poster, and naturally I chose the feature film Let There Be Rock. When deciding on how to create the poster, I chose the somewhat ambitious task of doing an A2 size eleven colour process screen print.

Looking back on these posters, it kinda makes me want to try my hand at silk screening again. Although the final result was pretty basic and unrefined with quite a few mistakes, I really like the raw and textural feel of the screen print. No two posters are alike, and it feels a bit more special that I screened all the colour separations myself, rather than just clicking the print button.

And just a note for those of you who live in WA, the Western Australian Museum will be holding an exhibition called AC/DC: Australia’s Family Jewels running from 16 April to 7 August 2011. Can't wait!

Look book

Brian Ewing is one of my fav designers, I first found out about him back in 2005 through the Art of Modern Rock book. He has done so many awesome gig posters, so I was very happy when he recently released a book of his work called Don't Hold Your Breath. It's so interesting to read his comments about each poster, and his work is just amazing. Definitely worth checking out!