Million Dollar Quartet - Poster

This was our second project for Advertising illustration with Prof. Ryan Sanchez. Broadway Musical Posters!

We were given a list of about 8 musicals and I chose Million Dollar Quartet. I was torn between this and La Cage Aux Folles.

Million Dollar Quartet is basically about one night in musical history. December 4, 1956, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis had an impromptu jam session at Sun Records in Memphis. The session was recorded, reporters were called, and now it's a musical!

I chose the Quartet since I've recently been listening to a lot of Elvis music. I listened to the other guys' stuff and loved it as well. Plus, all of this music also reminds me of my dad's music library, which is full of these oldies and hits from around the same time period (I think.)

So I came up with 18 ideas, chose 3 of those, made 9 comps (3 for each idea) and we finally rounded it down to this comp:

 I honestly can't say I was too excited about this idea. My favourite ideas all had old-timey microphones in them as the main focus but these heads were more appealing to everyone.

That's a very important part of the process of illustration. You definitely need to have other people look at your stuff because after a while, you can't see the forest for the trees. Basically it's easy to make stupid mistakes that become invisible to the artist but others can spot them immediately. And even though you might love a certain concept, others might feel that another concept will work better for the message.

The type was completely handmade and wasn't based on any pre-existing typeface. It was actually the first element I drew in my comps. After my unsatisfying experience with typography on the Restless CD cover, I decided to work with the type from the very beginning instead of the very end, that way I could continuously adjust the image's look to the text and vice versa. Basically the type and the image are based off each other simultaneously.

I then drew each element of the illustration by hand and scanned it in, for instance:

Added colour and texture in Photoshop and voila:

 

(Click to view larger.)

 From top to bottom: Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash. 

  

Still managed to keep the old-timey mic in there too! :)

I'm still thinking of making some colour adjustments to the image in the future but it shall stay like this for now.