Under the Influence

So, my plan to create art nouveau-inspired poster art has taken many turns and the perfectionist in me has gotten the better of my time.

As it happens, while I was checking out gear at EMS I saw a poster for a climbing festival that gave me plenty of new ideas...I didn't have a camera with me or else I would have taken a shot of it.

So I'm approaching the project from a new angle, and, since I'm sick of doing computer illustrations, I've changed mediums to watercolor (as I mentioned in a previous post, I'm an amateur watercolorist, but I can't leave it alone).

The inspiration for the watercolor style I am trying to achieve came from the cover of an April 2008 issue of Print Magazine.

I'm pretty sure it is a computer-generated image (I'm thinking that the artist essentially threw large blobs of watercolor paint on paper, scanned it onto a computer and negated the two images out of it using photoshop). But I don't believe in shortcuts so I am doing it by hand. If I was tight on time I would try the above theory, but I've got all the time in the world.

I've been practicing hard to emulate this technique and I'm actually close to getting it. Here is a detail of one of my better attempts:

Anyway, my Mucha-inspired poster is in the works and each day I throw something out, something better develops.

Definately stay tuned.

(Side note: the cover art for the ski DVD "Under The Influence" looks mighty familiar...)