TAAFI poster process

With the TAAFI festival a few weeks away, I thought it might be fun to post a few examples of my process and how we ended up with the final version of the poster that we did.

I initially sent TAAFI some rough sketches of a few different ideas. I blocked in the color on a few of them to help get a sense of the moods each would portray.

After some conversation, we decided that none of these were really hitting the goal of TAAFI's directive, so I did a few more quick sketches including this one below which we ended up moving forward with. Although its extremely loose and rough, I realize I kept surprisingly close to this in the final version. This sketchy bunch of scribbles was done in Sketchbook pro.

Once we were all on the same page with the idea, I started cleaning up the line art in Flash using the brush tool and putting some structure to the shapes.

Here is my first pass to block in the color. Again, this was all done in Flash with the paint bucket tool. I had a few different color ideas at this point, including the "Tribe Called Quest" inspired version below. I kinda dug that version myself but the consensus was to move forward with the more natural color style seen here.

And here is the final version with all the shades and colors that I ended up revising along the way. One of the big challenges at this stage was the request to lay the logo on a white background, but in hindsight I think having to revise the BG to compensate for this ended up really helping the poster. Again, the remainder of the coloring was done in Flash with the help if the gradient paint tool and I ran the final export through Photoshop once I was done to punch up a few of the values.

Now if I could only go back in and fix that blasted tangent on the tip of his horn...