Designing a festival poster and animation: Behind the scenes of a client project

Drawing Nature

Hey all,

Welcome to Drawing Nature, the companion newsletter to Human Nature where I talk about my illustration process.

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First of all, sorry this post is a day late. Although I don’t think anyone keeps track of these things, I do normally post on Tuesdays. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s move on to today’s post.

This week I’d like to talk about something a little different than usual and take you behind the scenes of a client project I worked on recently. The process is quite different to that of making the newsletter illustrations, plus this project involved animation—so I thought it could be interesting!

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Last month, I created a poster and an animation for Meadowlark music festival in Stone Ridge, New York. I already made an Instagram post about the process, but I thought I’d show you a little bit more here.

The brief was to create a design inspired by the venue—an apple orchard nestled between two mountain ridges—and a short animation to promote the festival on social media.

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Initial concepts

The organisers suggested a festival-goer walking through the apple orchard for the animation, so I proposed two poster designs with apples and one with a landscape:

While I was sketching, I had a new idea: I thought it could be cool if the animation transitions into the poster. So I came up with three animation concepts:

The first animation based on the concept the client suggested. When the character reaches the end of the orchard, the leaves open up to reveal the poster.

The second animation goes with the second poster. It's similar to the first one, except the apples are gigantic!

This one follows a family in a campervan on their way to the festival. It ends with a zoom out until the full poster is in view.

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Feedback and changes

The client liked the first concept for the animation and the third one for the poster the most—a festival-goer walking through an orchard and the poster with the landscape—and asked if we could combine the two. But first, the poster needed to be tweaked to better reflect the geography of the venue.

With little help from the client and Google Maps, I came up with two new options:

1. The Catskills and Shawagunk Ridge 2. Google Maps image with the two mountain ranges and the venue in the middle.

They preferred option 3B, which also happed to be my favourite, so I made new animation storyboards to go with that poster:

We had to zoom out to transition from the character to the poster because now the orchard was in the midground

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Influences

When working on something I’m new to—in this case a poster design—I like to create Pinterest board with both works of other artists and some of my own. I think it’s important not to lose track of your own voice while taking influence from others.

Pinterest board with some of my illustrations and works by Pia-Mélissa Laroche, Maddie Fischer, Scott Siedman and an unknown artist

P.S. If you’re reading this in your email inbox, the post might cut off around this point. But don’t worry, you can continue reading it online!

I was heavily inspired by the children’s book illustrations of Erik Bulatov & Oleg Vassiliev for this design. I liked the way they used the negative space of leaves to frame their illustrations and I decided to do something similar for the poster and animation backgrounds.

Illustration by Erik Bulatov & Oleg Vassiliev

I repurposed this character from an old Human Nature post for the animation

This photo of the Shawagunk Ridge inspired the bottom half and frame of the poster

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Making the animation

Styleframe for the animation