For the poster I wanted to return to the linocut printing that I’d tried out earlier but this time I wanted to create some of the architectural blocks that I’d settled on as my design motif instead of a pastoral scene with a bear. I cut out several blocks from lino and had a go at printing them onto a page in a cohesive design.

It quite quickly became apparent that this wasn’t quite working out how I’d hoped though. The small size of the tiles made them fiddly to print patterns with and the paper was getting really grubby from being handled repeatedly. Instead I decided that I’d opt for a mid point between physical print and digital design by printing each shape individually and then digitally importing and manipulating them on the computer:

Once I had the photos I quickly ran them through photoshop making them greyscale and turning up the contrast. From there I took them to illustrator and used the ‘Image Trace’ tool. After messing around with the sliders until they looked natural, I cut out the shapes as vector images. The resulting shapes looked pretty legit.

From there I added the shapes to a document and started playing around with layout. I decided that it was important to add the brand colours to the poster but I didn’t want to just use rigid boxes and rectangles to do so. I imported a brush texture instead and converted that into a vector image too. Using the two elements together I was then able to build up a really nice looking poster design that looked as if it had been hand printed even though it was composited on the PC.