Subject Object - Making the final poster

I decided to experiment with Adobe Illustrator because I thought it'd be more powerful for a poster. Also, I hadn't used digital media for uni before and have done lino a few times already.

I started by making a few sketches of possible poster ideas to get an idea of what to make on my laptop.

I created a simple outline of my cat on illustrator, then printed it out multiple times to draw what the colours might look like.

I then began to play around with different shapes and colours on Illustrator to see what would work best.

I played around with colour for a while and realized that a simple black and white theme worked best. I downloaded a few fonts. I wanted the focus to be on the cat and not so much a decorative font so I kept it quite simple.

After creating a few versions of these, I realized that my initial scrap poster still seemed to work better. I realized that having a photo of a real life cat was more powerful than having a simple silhouette. Having a photo of an actual animal makes a poster more eye catching and disturbing as it hits a more personal level.

I then took some more photos of Kyle on some white sheets, erased the background on Photoshop and bought it back in to Illustrator and turned it in to a vector drawing. I still wanted to keep that digital and minimal feel to the poster without completely erasing the details of Kyle so I thought a vector would work best.

I had two ideas for the text. The first one was 'What if they beat your cat for applause' and the second was 'If they don't dance, they don't eat'. I thought that the second one might work better with the image and tested that out. Then I played around with the layout.

This is my final image so far:

I like the structure of the text with the image and think the simple colours work quite well. I'm still fairly new to Illustrator and feel that this idea could have worked better if I knew how to use it properly. I want to play around with something suttle for the background, maybe a classic stripy circus pattern to really bring out the image of the cat or a simple silhouette of a circus tent...