We had the month of March off for Make Art That Sells (MATS), so I was able to focus more on watercolor. Now that April is here, our assignment was to start off with hand lettering. Pretty new to me but I used my new Skillshare class skills from Mary Kate McDevitt's Lettering II class and Jon Contino's Layouts for Lettering class as well. The "mini" assignment was to letter the words "Global Art Gathering".

So I worked on that for the first week, then we learned that our real assignment was a real live poster event brief! The Global Art Gathering is an event in Brighton, UK in June and the members of Bootcamp have a chance to have their poster chosen as the poster for the event. My inspiration was the famous vibrant beach houses and the calm that can take over when you go to the beach. The poster size is 20"x30" so I first sketched out some thumbnails. When I tried to complete a tighter sketch at 8"x10" that was a disaster. I'm comfortable drawing small so I broke down the size to get down to a proportionally correct sketch at 5"x7.25".

I brought the sketch into Illustrator and used the pen tool for the shapes and lettering. I worked in black and white so I could focus on the bones of the design. Then I enlarged the document to 20"x30". Once I had all the elements down, I used the color palette provided in the brief and added color. I added textures in Photoshop using smart objects. Here is the gallery for April with all of our Bootcamp posters! The other entries were amazing, can't wait to see whose poster is chosen. Learning tons from this class and it just feels good to see a project from start to finish.