Jazz Fest is coming again! I did the poster for this last year as well and I wanted to up the ante this year. But it didn't come very easily. I did a first version of the poster hated it. The figures were ghostly and my co-worker, who I work with on the festival, wanted a female instrumentalist represented, which would have been a really similar composition as last year's poster. Plus, someone said the drumsticks in the background looked phallic, which is not what I was going for. So, I didn't want to use the image after spending 10+ hours painting and photoshopping it:
In the hopes of salvaging the pieces that I did like, I pulled the image apart and tried to piece together different compositions that could work. But it felt all wrong and didn't look that great:
And so I started searching for inspiration and sketching anything that popped into my head, and I came up with this idea. This is the original poster colorization. I really like the black background, but we ended up choosing blue as a background because it is a daytime festival and we wanted to make it open and inviting for the whole family. I'll keep this version for myself. The other version will be plastered on subway ads and on sides of busses in a couple months. At least it's something I can feel good about.
