Concert Posters

Poster designs for fictional music shows in and around Buffalo, NY.

A personal project I took on during the nation-wide shutdown was to create concert posters for artists I’d like to (or would have liked to see 50 odd years ago) see come through my city. I compiled my own photos and illustrations together digitally, playing with many color schemes, type choices, and layout options before deciding on the final way I wanted to present the posters.

I had drawn this coyote smoking a cigarette one night while listening to an audiobook of Loretta Lynn’s autobiography Coal Miner’s Daughter, probably subconsciously inspired by the album cover for Colter Wall’s Imaginary Appalachia. I love the imagery of this mangey, starved coyote with a cigarette between his lips, on the prowl, or on the run maybe. The scratchy nature of my pen and ink illustrations lent itself well to creating texture on the two-dimensional poster I designed for a fictional Lukas Nelson concert.

“Ethereal” is a word that comes to mind when I think of Thom Yorke’s voice. I’ve been a Radiohead fan since high school, and was familiar with some of Yorke’s solo work, but only this past spring after I watched Suspiria (2018) that I really fell in love with it. The blue blur in the upper portion of the poster is a greatly distorted photo of myself. I isolated a particular corner of the original image, tweaked the color, enlarged, and added a blur to it to compose “the sky” of the ethereal landscape I wanted to represent Yorke in this poster.