The concert poster for the season premiere of the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra visually balances the light and dark of the musical program. I used the method I worked out from the April chamber concert poster playing with illustrator’s path settings. My intent is to use this theme for all the posters this year, changing the colors and mood depending on the pieces we play for each.
Join us Saturday, November 5, 2016 at Kresge Auditorium at MIT.
I set up a workspace with “artboards” for the whole season. This way I can see, compare, and use elements across the group of posters and ads. And what goes on the first poster tends to set the theme for the season.
There are always head-shots of the musical guests, along with a lot of text and sponsor logos. I like to pick a color scheme for the text to draw attention to the soloist. In the case of the Mahler poster above Indra Thomas’s beautiful photo has a lovely green-grey backdrop that I wanted to work with. And as a new Illustrator user, playing with text appearance was the most fun, so I decided I had my theme for the season. All the posters would have roughly the same layout with the “Cambridge Symphony Orchestra” text working with the soloist head-shots.
Here for “Holiday Pops” I chose Adobe’s subtle sparkle effect for the CSO text along with an already festive head-shot of Jennifer Sgroe and a happy photo of Cynthia Woods.
The Family Concert in January always features are remarkably talented young musician, this year was no exception. Visually, I loved that Yoo Jin Ahn’s cute head-shot has a white background. The CSO text illustrator fun for this concert was the bright pastel colors from the Illustrator “graphic styles” library.
Doing this for a couple of years now, I have to say the March concert always throws me for a loop for the color scheme. If I use springtime green it makes people think of St Patrick’s Day which is almost never the concert theme, and especially since the program for this concert is “The Russian Masters” I had to work with something else. I went with a color theme in the red and blue spectrum since using the grey in the soloists head-shot would make the poster too dreary, giving the CSO text a circular blue gradient glow.
The Chamber players need a poster from time to time, and I could go off the season’s theme trying something new. I played with Illustrator paths to create a fun swirly violin, and I loved this effect so much it is going to be the theme of the 2016-2017 posters.
This Firebird show with the accompanying ballet ended the classical season with a bang. The concert was a labor of love for many, with the dancers and musicians using their creativity to bring this event to the next level. I contributed with the painting “The Prince and the Firebird” that I was able to work into this poster format. Having too much fun with color and design I created this surface design line at Spoonflower.
And finally, for the end of the season I had some more Illustrator fun, creating warped text for the title. The CSO logo is still recognizable with the SYMPHONY portion shown in bold. The entire image has an under layer of crumpled paper to portray a summer-of-love type vibe to it. I used color picker to pull the color from the sponsorship logo to use for the background and lettering.
Often the tools used and project restrictions dictate what the posters will look like. The limits, I find, help the creative process, if only to keep projects from being over-designed.
The one most important thing that I have learned in this post-tech artistic life: designing is decision making.
6 posters. Big season made tiny to fit in this space.
Photos by Susan Wilson and Aram Comjean
A respin of last year.
Bring the kids, they get to conduct.
At Sennot Park in Cambridge.
For the last masterworks concert of the 2013 – 2014 season the CSO is playing the lovely peaceful Appalachian Spring by Aaron Copeland.
Mountains. Forest. Quiet.
Maybe I have a photo that would suffice. Like something I took at Rockywold Deephaven Camps while attending the Squam Art Workshops.
Yep, it was just like that. Peaceful.
This mini one for the newspaper.
Opera
I didn’t think I would like it, but I’d give it a try once.
So back in the late 1900s I saw there was a performance of The Marriage of Figaro performed by marionettes. Thinking, ‘yeah, I like marionettes, I’ll give marionette opera a try. There’s subtitles, it’ll be fine’.
Imagine, if you will, wooden people bouncing around on strings singing “Figaro, Fig-a-ro, FIG-aroooooo”, with their only emotional expression coming from how high or low their skinny arms are pulled.
“La,” wooden hand up, “lalalalalala“, wooden hand down, “LA“, wooden hand waving in flourish, “laaaaaaaaa“.
Bad.
Since my Italian grandfather loved opera and his sister sang opera, I wanted to give it a fair chance. Fortunately, I caught a modern adaptation of Don Giovanni with subtitles on PBS and LOVED it. Later on I even saw a live production of Cosi Fan Tutti in Boston with real human beings in it and enjoyed that as well, if only cuz of it’s “Three’s Company” farcical style plot.
I wish my grandfather and his sister were around to see our Cambridge Symphony Orchestra production of Tosca on Sunday March 16.
So, the poster… what the heck do I do?
I was stumped at the enormity of the task as I knew how excited everyone is to get this right. I was frozen trying to come up with imagery that will dignify the event.
I started with doodles in my engineering notebook during a meeting.
I doodled up a dagger with a hilt that looked like a violin sound hole. Thought, hey cool, and was on my way. I spent the weekend in my art space in my basement with India inks, acrylic paint, tissue paper, and cut paper. Spent some time figuring out how to draw an art nouveau font, and came up with this.
And then, thinking the concert will be in springtime I decided to make the red pop by putting it on an aqua background.
All the while I’m working on the clever dagger idea this is sitting on the easel behind me.
In 2012 I’d taken Flora Bowley’s ecourse to get back into painting, which I hadn’t done at any length since I was a teenager. Her approach has you just painting a bunch of gobbledy-gook with fluid acrylics, honing and fixing, until you work it up into something truly unique… as you had no idea what you were going to paint when you started. She wants you to have messy underpaintings.
This is the underpainting for what became the final Tosca poster.
Embarrassing, a bit, to show it here, but I wanted to show that I was going for an angry red busy unsettling vibe when I painted it.
Then, in the ecourse, Flora suggests going big and bold, draw a big image, make a big change, be unexpected. I painted a big face over the angry red background, I wanted a pretty face, but where you could still see the messy disturbed underpainting in the eyes.
And there she sat for months, in my basement, I didn’t know where to take it.
With this painting behind me and the cheery dagger painting in front of me I rented a Tosca DVD and figured I’d let the story percolate so I would have a better clue of how to make this right.
Here’s the TL;DR of Tosca: Tosca has a painter boyfriend, she’s jealous, she’s pretty, creepy guys are into her, and she would kill a man if she had to.
And her name is Floria. Floria, come stai?
Now I knew what to do with the painting.
Come to the concert… find out what happens to her.
Not a lot of insight into the design of this one.
It’s about baseball, I went literal.
Thanks to Aram for the feedback, as always.
The last poster of the season. I’m always looking for a simple Americana vibe to this poster since we are creeping up on the 4th of July, … some red, white, and blue. The music we play is good Pops schlock: show tunes, tv shows, a legit but short classical piece. This concert is about connecting with Cambridge, MA and giving back by having a grand old time out in Sennott Park with people that just happened to be walking by as much as making an effort to come out and support us.
Red, white, and blue, baby… summer of love. Come by Sunday June 23, 2013 at 3pm to hear us play. Let’s give Norfolk Street some love.
And don’t forget to bring a little kid, the conductor might just let them conduct. (seriously, tho, she might) 😉
After looking into the content of this music I needed to portray the idea of “star-crossed lovers”, while still leaving room for all the business these orchestra posters need. I didn’t want to go as specific as a classic painting of Romeo and Juliet or the standard dark images that go along with the Verdi. Nor did I want to draw a cartoon heart with feet trying to get away with something. In my adventure of learning how to do graphic design I like looking back at the older posters I’ve done to objectively decide which ones were most successful, specifically the March and June concerts of the 2010-2011 season. The plain white background, though the work is done on a computer, suggests, I think, that the poster was printed old skool, with limited layered colors. This is what I tried for here.
Now if I can get that Shostokovich riff out of my head. A challenging piece to learn, very rewarding to play.
– H
Cambridge Symphony Orchestra
Family Concert, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
program includes:
Violin Concerto in D major by Piotr Tchaikovsky
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Paul Dukas