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This past Saturday, I had the pleasure of being one of three invited designers at the March installment of X. X is a monthly gathering of people that celebrate the creative culture in DC. The event usually includes an invited fashion designer, djs, visual artists, graphic designers and many others.

The three graphic designers that are invited are given three words by a curator and with those three words the designers must then go and create something keeping those words in mind and also being sure to include the X formula which is X = LIVE (PERFORMANCE + ART + PROJECTIONS + ELECTRONICA + FASHION) + YOU! Designers have a time period of 4 hours to create something while three projectors showcase each designer’s process and of course final product.

At the end of the event, the curator chooses a winning design. This month’s curator was Jesse Cohen from ArtDC.org and the words given to us were: Erotic, Halftone and Liquid. Below is the winning design, which I created broken down into small pieces. You can click on individual pieces of the design to see a larger version of that piece and see the details of the halftone.

The Design

The Process
I wanted my design to be a poster in case I wanted to print it out later so I started off with an 11×17 canvas in Photoshop. I first focused on the word “erotic” and researched images related to burlesque and together with halftone patterns was going to move into 1940’s and 1950’s pin up girls. I knew I didn’t have enough time to illustrate something, so decided to stick with photographs.

I used Adobe Kuler to come up with a burlesque colour scheme (Go to Adobe Kuler and search “Honest Burlesque” to see the colour scheme I started off with) I remembered I had an old picture of the pope that I had found on a trip to Italy and had scanned in, so for “liquid” I decided I was going to go with holy water and to make it more obvious I decided to put “Aqua Sanctum” which is Latin for holy water.

At the end of the 4 hours it turned into a real pimp pope hanging out with some really trashy twins and kicking back with his crew of real life pin up girls which are all begging to be blessed by the pope’s holiest of waters. I achieved the halftone effect by making copies of all my layers, desaturating them, then pixelating then turning down the opacity on all of the halftone layers. I used scanned images of papers to give the picture some texture and dirtied it up a bit more with some brushes in Photoshop. Here are some links to the final image:

1024 x 663 jpeg of poster
800 x 518 jpeg of poster
High Resolution PDF at 11 x 17 (Large File)

Thanks to everyone that came out and supported, thanks to X for inviting me and shout out to the other talented designers that I met Sarah Foster and Chris Spade, who also created some awesome pieces.

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