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.

It's all happening in Eugene

May is Wildflower Month in Eugene, Oregon! I'm delighted to announce that the Wildflowers of Oregon show that I'm participating in will be on exhibit at the Art Annex all through May. (I'm also really jazzed to be heading to that fine, funky town for the reception, on Friday, May 3--join me?)

In other wildflower news, the poster for the Mount Pisgah Arboretum Wildflower Festival is gearing up for a crazy-fun day on Sunday, May 19. The poster, featuring my oversized Nemophila flowers with the happy dance flies, is probably sprouting up all over Eugene and Springfield right about now...Fun times!

Idea-Gathering for Wildflower Festival Posters

It sounds like the official Wildflower Festival posters are going to start appearing around the Eugene/Springfield area of Oregon this weekend! To celebrate, more preliminary sketches from that project--when we were still trying to decide what species of bird, and what species of butterfly, would work best. Ideas, measurements, data, doodles.

Some of those quick drawings of birds singing their hearts out are so funny to me. Makes me think of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, where the song sparrow bursts into a rousing chorus of "On Top of Spaghetti..."

4/22/12 Edited to add: Realizing folks may not have followed the link at the top to see the final poster in all its purple glory, will include that image here. Yay!

Wildflower Season

Mount Pisgah Arboretum invited me to do the poster art for their Wildflower Festival again this year. The event, which is scheduled for May 20, 2012, is always a delightful one--great music, great food, great people, and hundreds and hundreds of local wildflowers with botanists galore to tell you all about them.

The featured flower on the poster this year is the riverine lupine, Lupinus rivularis. Since I am such a fan of talking about sketching as a process, here are some of hidden, early layers in the Photoshop file that show me doodling rough shapes and colors before settling in on the final arrangement.

Similarly, the yellow-rumped warbler went through a lot of different poses and refinements before it ended up in its final state.

Keep your eyes open; volunteers will be putting posters up all over the Eugene/Springfield area soon!

More posts about creating posters for festivals at Mount Pisgah Arboretum:

• Lobster Mushroom
• Monkeyflowers
• Witches's cap with banana slug
• California oatgrass

Lines, lines, lines

I'm working on the Wildflower Festival poster, developing the delightfully complex layers of leaves and stalks and flowers that make up the lupine shrub. I'm at the stage where most of the line-work is done, but I need to look it over and tidy things up: cleaning up any wobbles, adjusting line weights, and making sure that things are overlapping correctly--none of the leaves that are in the back should be drawn on top of a stem or a flower that should be in the front, of course.

Which makes me remember a book that I enjoyed as a child: The Borrowers, by Mary Norton. I enjoyed the story as a child, but I also remember being startled by the illustrations. They are lovely line drawings by Beth and Joe Krush. The illustrators use what, to me, was a totally startling and even rebellious approach: they didn't fuss with planning out the foreground/background relationships too much, so that you can see the lines of stuff in the background right through the stuff in the foreground.

See how you can see the edge of the table right through the tiny man's legs? And you can see the edge of the bed right through the table? And you can see the lines of the bedsheet, as well as the chamber-pot, right through the cane?

Scandal! Or perhaps a clever way to hint that this is all in one's imagination? Or perhaps just a really fun, anti-uptight approach to line drawings? Hats off the to Krushes for being starting and delightful in a way that has stuck in my head since elementary school.

(More images from The Borrowers. Seriously, it's worth a pop by the library to revisit this one.)

All right, back to work for me.

A Flock of Butterflies

Working on the poster art for the Wildflower Festival at Mount Pisgah Arboretum. Amused by the flock of butterflies on the screen, as reference photos.

I'm trying out the spring-loaded nib for my Wacom tablet for part of the line work. It started out feeling much more fluid to draw with, but as the night creeps on, the responsiveness of the nib seems to be amplifying my wriggly-handed exhaustion. To bed, then, with visions of butterflies dancing in my head.

Library Nerd

Took myself to the Portland State University library for the first time this week. I was looking up books on the philosophy of biology for work, but of course had to wander through the illustration section of the stacks as well. Was captivated by a book of posters by Maurice Sendak--man, that fellow can blend cross-hatching with delicate watercolors like a dream. Found this illustration from his interpretation of Ozma of Oz: look at Dorothy's oversize shoes with no laces, and how she almost looks sad-eyed in his rendition. Captivating.

I also came across a book from the 1600s that was full of home remedies for various ailments. It wasn't illustrated, but I loved the crazy archaic fonts and the spellings of common words. (Ah, the "long s" always makes me nostalgic for my Renaissance Faire days!)

I suppose that's one benefit to visiting libraries where you don't have borrowing privileges; it makes you take good visual notes on what you are excited about. (Or, in the case of the biology of philosophy articles, it lets you spend quality time with the photocopy machine.)