Sunday, October 2, 2011

Ramona Quimby Show Poster


Initial, ugly sketch.

In case you're not familiar with Ramona Quimby, she's a pugnacious and imaginative girl featured in a series of books by Beverly Cleary. The character has appeared in movies, on television and a stage play. My illustration of Ramona is for the Los Altos Youth Theater production of Ramona Quimby.

The theater needed a poster and a t-shirt design. The poster would be printed in color. The t-shirt needed to be line art only.

Digital sketch done in Photoshop.
Effective posters are eye-catching and make a clear and concise pitch. After mulling over several ideas, I settled on this simple and fun approach. The show's title, a big selling point, is big and bold. Ramona is wide eyed and grinning as she mischievously pushes the show's title out of her way. I think it quickly conveys the essence of the character and the show: fun and kid-centric.


Once I had a sketch, I started the line art for the t-shirt. In the past, I'd do this type of work with a brush and ink, but I've gotten more comfortable "inking" on the computer. The Ramona illustration was "inked" in Photoshop. I traced my hand drawn lettering in Adobe Illustrator. Eventually, both elements (Ramona illustration and lettering) were combined in Illustrator and converted into a vector file for the t-shirt printer.

Line art version of the image for screen-printing  t-shirts.

Unlike the t-shirt, the poster art had no limitations. I based Ramona's color scheme on a production photo. I chose the yellow because it's a warm, eye-catching color – and the dark teal because it compliments the other colors while providing enough contrast to pop.

2 comments:

Mrs. Chili said...

I love your work.

Would you be interested in coming to my school to talk to the kids about making a living as an artist?

Robert Squier said...

Thanks, Mrs. Chili! School visits scare me but I need to start doing them. Send me an email and we'll make it happen:-)