Concert Poster

I decided to do my concert poster on Kenny Chesney. I have seen Kenny in concert multiple times, and I have a good idea of what theme his music presents. Because Kenny’s music is mostly about relaxation, summertime and beaches, I decided to make the background of the image a beach. I found the image of the beach online. I added to image to Photoshop and cropped the image to be the correct size for the poster. I saved the image in the correct size so that it would fit perfectly to the Quark document. I made this image the background layer in my Quark document by selecting the Rectangle Picture Box Tool and selecting the entire poster. I added the picture as the background by selecting File → Import Picture. I selected the newly formatted beach from the desktop. The second layer that I used for this poster was an image of Kenny. By using the same tool, I selected the left bottom corner of the poster. I imported Kenny’s image, and moved the image around until it fit aesthetically with the rest of the background.

I had trouble with the fonts in Quark. I did not like how you couldn’t see examples of the fonts when looking through the lists. To find the sample’s, I opened a text box in Photoshop and found the fonts that I would intend on using there. I immediately found a font that I wanted to use for the words “Kenny Chesney.” The font is Charlemagne Std. Bold at size 77. I chose this font because it reminded me of the font that was used on one of his albums that I own. It also appeared large enough to attract the audience’s attention. After looking through many colors, I found an off-white color that matched Kenny’s shirt. I used this for the font. I decided to put a grey shadow on the font to match Kenny’s shirt and tie in the font with the image. I decided that this poster would feature his album, Lucky Old Sun, because it fit with the theme. I made the words “Lucky Old Sun Beachside Tour” in the font Zapfino at size 36. I did this because the font relays to me a very relaxed emotion, which is the exact feeling presented by Kenny’s album. I matched the color and shadow of this font to the font in “Kenny Chesney.” Originally, I had the remainder of the writing in a Serif font. During critique, I was told that the Serif font did not fit the theme of the poster. I changed the remaining font to Zapfino at a smaller size to match the tour title, but not take away from it. I found a dark brown color that matched the palm tree and bolded the writing to make it stand out from the sand and ocean. I also added a shadow to the font to match it with the tour title and artist name.

Of all the things I did on this project, I am most proud of my images. As I mentioned before, I cropped the beach scene in Photoshop to the exact size to use as the background. My image of Kenny Chesney was not as simple. I wanted to have Kenny Chesney appear as if he was just standing on the beach, and this required cutting him out of another image. Originally, I used the magnetic lasso tool to cut out Kenny. Unfortunately, the magnetic lasso did not work around the fine areas, for example, Kenny’s toes. I decided to search for another image. I found an image of Kenny standing up, so I decided to use this image instead. Once again, I added this to Photoshop. Instead of using the magnetic lasso, I decided to use the Quick Selection tool. This tool allowed me to get a rough outline of his body. After I had the approximate outline, I selected and dragged Kenny into a new project. The image that I cut Kenny out of had a grey background, so I decided to make the background of this new project black so that I could clearly see where unwanted parts of the old image remained. Staying selected on the layer that was the image of Kenny, I used the Eraser tool to erase the extraneous background that surrounded Kenny that I did not want. I did this with Brush Size 3 and Hardness at 50% so the image would not appear to roughly cut. After I erased the parts that I did not desire, I changed the background color to white once again to ensure there were no parts that I missed. In this new project, I realized that the background color should be transparent so that when I add the image, a white box wouldn’t appear around his body. I did this by double-clicking on the background layer and making it transparent. After I made the final touches, I added the image to Quark.

I did not like Quark as much as I liked Photoshop. As I have already mentioned, I did not like that I could not see Sample’s of the fonts. Another thing that I did not like was that it was very hard for me to find colors. I think this might have been because I am not familiar with this system. In the past I have found colors in programs by using a color wheel. If you select a color, it shows you a range of the color from black to white. This was not the case in Quark. In Quark, I found my colors by selecting a specific type of color (ex, RGB, CMYK, Pantone, etc.) and scrolling through many different colors. It took me a very long time to find one that matched. I also did not like that I could not edit my images in Quark and had to do them in Photoshop instead. One thing that I liked about Quark was the flexibility to move things around and adjust the layers. Also, I liked how the styles box was at the bottom of the screen. I like the setup of Quark better than Photoshop.