Psychedelic Gig Poster

I absolutely love the sixties and I love the colorful designs of that era. I wanted to pay homage to the awesome, funky, psychedelic posters of the late sixties with this gig poster for a fake band that I made up.

I knew that in order to channel a psychedelic feel into this poster, I needed a design that used negative space to create dimension and outline the words. I thought of tiger stripes and how cool it would be to have a tiger be the focal point of the design and name my fake band "The Kings" as in the kings of the jungle.

I started studying photos of tigers, trying to understand how their stripes worked and getting a feel for what all tigers had in common so that I could draw my own. After sketching a few tigers, I picked my best one and scanned it in. I then used Illustrator to start to create shapes and extend the stripes to form words.

It was an undertaking and very frustrating, but when it started to come together it became easier to see where different lines could connect. It's been so difficult to explain my process on this one!

Anyway, I really love the way it turned out and I think I'm going to look into creating more decade-themed designs.