Mushroom Festival Poster!

Oh my goodness, October is whooshing by so fast. I should probably post how the Mushroom Festival poster turned out, since they are now peppered all over the Eugene and Springfield areas in anticipation of the grand event!

My previous post talked about how I was experimenting with the composition. Having nailed that down, I went into make-it-so-mode. I started off with a fast loose sketch to serve as guidelines...

 Then started settling in on the colors that would go into each area (again, fast and loose).

At this point, I realized that my birds were out of whack! I was so fascinated with the strange morphology and brilliant coloration of the turkey heads that they had become too big for their bodies. It's nice to be able to catch these things before a lot of final detail goes into place. So I went back to my reference photos and started getting serious about those turkey details.

Ah yes. Big birds with tiny pin-heads. Now we are talking.

Now that the pesky heads were figured out, started tackling the turkey-tail mushrooms themselves. The fungi are the stars of the show, after all!

And here we have the final shiny rendering.

Which was then popped into the final event poster! (You can see a nice big version of it on the Mount Pisgah Arboretum website.) Fun!

Turkey Dioramas

As I worked on the Mushroom Festival poster this year, I found myself wresting with the relative scale of things. Turkeytail mushrooms are about 7 cm wide, while a wild turkey is at least a meter long. How best to show them both in one image, knowing that the smaller mushrooms need to be the center of attention?

I took a sheet of foam core and cut out a tree branch and a turkey approximately to scale, and then covered the tree branch with paper mushrooms. Then it was diorama time in the front yard!

 

Even with crude, out-of-focus photos, this exercise helped me a lot with my experiments in composition. From there, I did a few very rough color mock-ups of possible poster layouts in Photoshop.

Sending these rough ideas to the festival committee, the response was overwhelmingly positive for the three-turkey parade in the distant background of the tree branch. Hurrah! Next post, I'll go into the details of how I took that crude scribble and turned it into the final poster art.