Posters of an interesting plant

This project entailed drawing a plant from life, researching it, then composing it into a poster or similar for the purposes of being printed in the future. The purpose of this design is to eventually adorn posters, notebooks and cards for sale. I also wanted to experiment using a limited colour palette.

Deliverables:

I wanted a minimum of 4 posters, utilising typography in a complimentary way, with social media thumbnails and a time lapse video showing the process.

Tools and programs

I primarily used Adobe Illustrator for all of the illustrations. I also recorded the entire process using OBS as a screen recorder, which I then edited down with Premiere Rush. Photoshop was used to create the mockups.

Design process

Mockups of the completed posters

Posters

Screen recording of the entire process using OBS

Process in detail

I have a number of succulents in my very small garden that I thought would be suitable for a pattern, or exploration in Adobe Illustrator, so after taking a reference photo, I traced it and smoothed out the lines so they were more even.

For this project, I wanted to stick with a fairly defined colour palette, and I wanted to see the versatility of the colours I chose for my own brand, which were inspired by textiles housed at the V&A museum and published with CMYK codes in Spectrum : heritage patterns and colours (WorldCat link). I did experiment with some recolouring, however settled on keeping the original 4 colours.

Beth Ellen Regular was used for the typeface, however for the vertical versions the leading and kerning was modified to look more natural.

As part of my ongoing desire to become more familiar with screen recording, sharing my process (for better or for worse) and editing video, I screen recorded the entire process using OBS, a free program familiar to streamers, and Adobe Premiere Rush, which is a good entry point for basic video editing. I wanted to find the place between only keeping interesting bits and big movements and length. In the end, I reduced multiple hours of work into 45 minutes, with the recording speed increased to 800%. This, in combination with numerous copyright free classical music tracks overlaid, is a good first attempt at this.

Finally, social media thumbnails for Instagram were created so that promotion of this project, with links to my portfolio, could be easily accessible.