Exercise: Museum Posters

Museum Posters

14/05/2018 

' You have been asked to produce three illustrations to be used as part of a series of A3 posters to publicise the museum to the following audiences:

Child aged 5-9   Teenager (13-16)   General adult audience

The museum wants to encourage diverse sections of the population to visit and to perceive it as a place of interest. Go to your local museum or anywhere that has a range of interesting artefact's to gather good visual references. Choose exhibits which are either appropriate for each of the audience or which you think can be made interesting for the audience through your visual intervention.

Catalogue the exhibits in some way: photograph them, do printouts or make a series of drawings.

You are making three illustrations for three posters from the same institution. Will they be a 'family' or very different?

Decided on the visual approach you would like to adopt. Do you want to introduce a character or create a visual narrative? Do you want to make a decorative interpretation of the object? Do you want to place the object in the historic or geographic setting in which it was created? Do you want to depict the object to convey some aspect of it that you feel will be interesting to your audience/ Will you choose and abstract, representational, or diagrammatical approach? You don't have to be bound by direct representation of your object but it should be recognisable. 

Choose the media and colour range appropriate for your audience - but avoid generalisations and stereotypes.

Working to a scale that best suits you, produce colour visuals for all posters - remember that for your poster you're aiming for visual clarity and directness. Posters are often read from a distance so your image needs to be reasonably bold. 

Prepare finished artwork for at least one poster.' 

  I started by making notes of colours that would attract different age groups:

Notes

   Then I researched museum posters for children and made a mood board, I tried to do the same for teenagers and adults but the search came up as a dud so I scrapped that part.

  Below is the mood board for children museum posters:

Children Museum Poster - Moodboard 

  I tried to the research posters for teenager and adult but there was no difference between the posters that where appearing so I decided to do a general museum poster search to see what cropped up:

Museum Posters - Moodboard

  Looking at these museum posters I didn't get any inspirations from them, I have been suffering from creative block and this didn't inspire me. 

  I took a trip to Manchester Museum last year and took 44 photo's of piece that I found interesting:

  I wrote next to the photo's poster Ideas that interested me the most and what would make an interesting poster these included:

1. Dinosaurs

2. Samurai Warriors

3. Ancient Egypt 

  To get my inspiration I did three separate mood boards for each idea:

Dinosaur Moodboard

Samurai Moodboard

Ancient Egyptian Moodboard

  These mood boards got my creative juices flowing, I decided that it was between two the Dinosaur's or Samurai. When looking at the Ancient Egyptian Posters they didn't really impress me that mush the colours are bland there is a lot of beige and it doesn't really stand out.

  

  After much consideration I decided upon doing a Samurai poster as a challenge. I think in general people would pick dinosaurs as everyone loves dinosaurs, I want abit of a challenge.

  Looking at the Samurai mood board its very dark and aggressive posters, I want to aim to make it more Colourful and less violent but keeping the interest in wanting to know about the subject. 

  There are two posters that I stumbled across:

GeekTyrant News 

GeekTyrant News 

  When looking on these two posters I became inspired because of the use of colour and the illustration that they have used, I want to try and recreate this but in my own style but using primary colours for children, experimental shades for teenagers and toned down tones for adult, once I have done a mock up of these I will decide which one I want to develop further. I think I am going to try and keep these in a series of posters so they that relate to each other.



31/05/2018

  Giving this some thought I have Chibi books and to make a Samurai less violent I also looked at some chibi's online of Deadpool he's a violent 'superhero' and to see how they have made it more kid 'friendly':

Deadpool

Deadpool

Sketchbook

  After looking at Chibi art of super hero's that are violent and how they are brought across here is my Chibi character design for my samurai:

Character Design 

 

Chibi Samurai 

 

   So to develop my samurai I did some research on the type of armour they wore and I came across some red armour. The armour is based on ancient samurai armour which is fitting for a museum. I kept the first design simple as I didn't want to over do the design of the character and I feel that it works quite well. 

  After I was happy with how my samurai looked I decided to mock up some Ideas, I did 4 idea's for each subject; Children, teenagers, adults. 

Page_01 - Ideas

Page_02 - Ideas 

 

    Then I quickly mocked up on photoshop an idea from each subject:

Children Poster

Teenage Poster

Adult Poster

    So I decided to do the children poster for this exercise as I think the samurai suits it better here is my finished poster:

Final Poster

  
  I kept the rule of bright colours, I had a bad case of creative block for this exercise. I feel that I have kept it simple for a child to look at; bright colours, simple outlines not too much detail and the bare minimal information apart from which museum it is at. 
  I am quite pleased with the design but I can't help but think its missing something, yet I can't think what else to put into the design. I feel that the photo's I taken wouldn't go with the design or they are not good enough to put in. In spite of something missing I feel that I hit the children side of it with the samurai character.