sketchbookfactory

I write a live radio play series called Night of the Chicken. Last year I made a poster for the show that I was quite proud of. To be honest, I didn’t think I had the drawing ability, nor the graphic skills to make such an awesome poster. Luckily I got a TON of help from some of my friends and they helped me stumble through the process.

Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to see how it developed from the initial sketch to the final product.

I made this first sketch back when I was writing the first episode. I kind of did this drawing just for fun. Back then I never dreamed that Night of the Chicken would actually see an audience. Let alone have a sequel.

Sometime later my good friend, and kick-ass artist,  Jessica Hickman did this drawing for me as a gift. It’s pretty common for artists to draw pictures of their friends’ characters in their own style and give them as a present.

Sometime after that Night of the Chicken (ep. 1) found it’s way to Space 55 in Phoenix. And it was great. I didn’t make the poster for that show. They already had one made before I had a chance to take a crack at it, but I didn’t mind because the poster they made was actually pretty cool. Here it is.

Okay so fast forward some time after that. Night of the Chicken (ep. 2) was ready to take the stage and I was ready to take on the challenge of making the poster myself. Using the drawing that Jess did as inspiration, I came up with this line drawing of my character.

Then I scanned her into Photoshop and added some color, as well as a background and title.

Jess gave me a lot of guidance (via email) about how to use Photoshop to add shadow and color your characters. I also got a lot of technical advice from Brad, the graphic designer at work. I made several attempts to draw my own set of lockers, but was never happy with them. Then like a miracle I found some free clip art of this perfect locker, which I messed around with until it became a wall of receding lockers.

Once this initial post card image was done, I had to turn it into a poster with all the showtimes and stuff on it. That’s when my friend Kim came in. Kim has zero skill with photoshop, but tons of experience with telling her husband how to make the posters for her shows. So she came over one night and we worked on it together. Actually she did most of the creative thinking, while I sat in front of the computer and carried out her bidding in a somewhat Igor-like manner.

In the end, we came up with this little gem. I have no shame in bragging about it, because even though I technically performed all the physical actions to create this image–it was the advice I got from Jess, Brad, and Kim that made it so awesome.