Making a Poster

Proletariat Drinker

In 2009, my brother and I became involved with the Pour-A-Palooza Beer Festival hosted by The Pour House in Westmont, NJ through our beer blog The Ferment Nation.  For this event, I wound up creating a poster that served as supplementary advertising for the event (see left).  It's pretty easy to see that I was going for a Soviet propaganda poster effect, a little bit Proletarian, and little bit the beer-drinking Everyman.  Although I do not have a very good website to recommend if you look for Google Images of Soviet posters, propaganda posters, Stalin or Lenin posters, etc., you will see my inspiration.  There is obviously something sinister about these posters, not only because of the regimes they supported but also because they are so naked and stark in their "instruction" to the audience/viewer.  Of course, they are also very bold and striking, and mesmerizing in a way.  The man is in a heroic pose, holding up his beer like a war trophy or a banner.  I used heavy-handed black and blocky shadowing and bold lettering, with some backwards "R" thrown in for good measure to give it a Soviet feel.  Primary colors and half-tone effects through the computer gave it a look of a mass produced lithograph (I hoped).  I really like have overlapping and slightly off-kilter layers with the halftone effect to give the digital creation more of a hand pulled piece of art effect.  A funny story: the manager of the Pour House was accosted by a confused drinker who thought the poster was an endorsement of President Obama and his "Socialist agenda" (and this was in New Jersey).

J. Howard Miller's "We Can Do It!"

So, in 2010, I did not want to do the same thing, but I thought I might keep with the wartime propaganda theme.  J. Howard Miller's poster "We Can Do It!" provided the inspiration.  I felt that co-opting a feminist icon and the WWII war effort to further the drinking of beer was totally legitimate.  I basically took the basic pose of the women in Miller's poster and modified it.  I tried to combine Miller's strong woman with a WWII bomber plan "nose art" pin-up girl (think of the movie Memphis Belle).  She had to be a woman who could lure you into a bar and then drink you under the table.

I started off with a pencil drawing, using basic HB and 2B pencils.  After getting a rough sketch, I refined it, again using pencils.  My first intention was to ink in the drawing like comic art, but to be honest, if you are not feeling confident with your brush strokes on a piece of art that you are trying to finish and publish in time for an event, you go with your strengths, in this case, pencils.  So, with a 4B pencil (if I remember correctly) I laid down some solid and final lines.  Using the threshold settings in Paint Shop Pro, I scanned the pencil drawing as black and white line art.  This would give me the best chance to layer and then color the art.

The second step here was adding color and although I try to stick to very bold and primary colors when dealing with posters, I finally went with more effects: layering of colors and the halftone effect to make the color palette less cartoonish.  What I like to do is have the black and white raster layer be the background and then create another layer with the white removed, kind of like a plastic overlay in a cartoon animation cel.  Then I start adding color layers and then using the halftone effect with varying sized circles and keeping a transparent background, so you can have a dark blue halftone patch over top of a lighter blue background.  You can see from the final piece here that the poster is largely a piece of graphic design.  The outline of the We Can Brew It! woman is the only hand-drawn portion of the poster.  The rest is achieved through various vector and raster layers in PSP.  The same could be said for the Proletariat Drinker from the first poster shown in this post.  Only the man and his beer are hand-drawn and scanned.  the sunburst effect, the stars, and obviously the text were all added via computer.

Tools Used: HB, 2B, 4B pencil, scanner, Paint Shop Pro.