The posters where on display durring the annual Downtown Miracle on 7th Street festival. You can see all 5 posters below!

Come for a 1 day exhibition during the Miracle on 7th Street in downtown Terre Haute. Friday, December 7, 2012 from 6 to 10pm at 683 Wabash Ave. Suite 208, Above Crossroads Cafe. I Love This Town is a new series of posters by Levi McGranahan that celebrates the current and past culture of Terre Haute. Oh yeah, and you can see a cool animated gif of the poster here.

 After I had designed the first print I was very excited about the style of the icons, so I decided to make a companion print that together with the first would tell some sort of story. So for the second print I wanted to tell the story of what happens after the adventure which is what led me to name the prints Restless Youth and Everything After.

The imagery in the second print is based on a quote by the Cuban poet José Martí. When asked what 3 things every man should do before he dies Martí responded:

“plant a tree, write a book, and have a son”

Here are some of the initial sketches.

Here are the final designs after I added some texture to give them some depth. The posters were printed by the super-talented guys at Vahalla Studios. They did such a good job printing them and they look great.

So the way it works is each artist picks a word from Douglas Harper’s website  Etymonline.com and then creates their own visual interpretation of that word based on it’s historical meanings. I chose the word hack. I had a fairly clear idea of final shapes in my head so I was able to sketch it out quickly.

I experimented with the colors a lot after I finished the vector drawing and this is what I ended up with. I based the computer drawing on the Apple Macintosh. The colors are sort of washed out and muted but I think it matches the aesthetic of 80s computers. Nerd Alert—I played around with pasting high contrast black and white textures into layer masks in Photoshop and I love the results.

I spent a lot of time sketching and landed on the idea of this forced perspective train engine using the front “cap” to display a message. I thought the train imagery tied in nicely with the “long way” part of the lyric.

These are a couple of shots I posted on Dribbble along the way. You can see the final poster starting to take shape.

Here is the final poster and a couple of detail shots. Please go check out The Just Love Project website and buy some posters. All of the profits go to a good cause and it’s a nice opportunity to pick up some beautiful limited-edition artwork.

From the start the original concept focused around a bird cage. Two of the bands had names with birds so it felt natural. The first idea I had was a bird in the cage with a cat looking on (Robins, Crows, Blackcat). After a whole page of thumbnails I still wasn’t feeling great about the shape of the bird, so I switched my focus to that. The sketches below show just a few of the iterations of the bird and then final shape of the bird that I ended up using.

Below is the final poster roughed up a little bit with some homemade ink textures in the background. I have a small brayer and some acrylic paint that I thin out and use to make textures like this. The acrylic makes for a little more randomness in the texture and it’s pretty cheap too. I used one of Lost Type Co-Op’s newer typefaces, Arvil Sans, for the heading. I can’t say enough good things about Lost Type. What they are doing is great, definitely go check them out if you are looking for quality typefaces at reasonable prices. The rest of the type is good old Garamond Italic, which I think looks pretty good with Arvil.

And yes, this is an Instagram picture from my phone.

If I already have a really clear idea of what I want to do, I go straight to sketching thumbnails. (above left) From there I usually try to refine the final idea with a large sketch. (above right)
The concept was pretty clear on this one so drawing vectors went quickly. (left) I roughed up the final and added some slight paper/grid textures. (right) I pretend like I don’t want to use it, but some negatively kerned Helvetica did the trick to finish it off.