Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Poster for France / Slow Motion Heroes



Posters for new Cork band, France (now known as Slow Motion Heroes - changed the name just as I finished the posters!).

I spent a lot of time drawing the actual buildings, lots of messing with perspective grids in illustrator & reading up architecture books for inspiration! I also experimented a lot with the style of representation, using real-world textures on the buildings and eventually discarding these in favour of a hand-drawn look. I shaded the buildings using a crosshatch technique with drawing pens, eventually using these for the more muted image and using hand drawn, unfilled buildings for the more colourful image.

The name of the band, "France" being synonymous with a place, I wanted to create a landscape, turning the country into an imaginary city. I had a number of different ideas for the landscape, which eventually pared down to two, as shown above. One involved a fantasy, dreamlike place. The other is more "real world", based on the view from my family home in Carrigtwohill, which to me (maybe not to everyone!) represents a tranquility that results from a certain amount of removal from the rest of the world, but also, conversely, excitement, energy and the possibilities of the great unknown!

Image for HIN album cover



Done in pastels & photoshop (face in photoshop with a wacom, pastels in pastels!) I'm hoping it reflects the energy and intensity of the songs on the album, as well as the lovely layered melodies & textures they've got going on.