Several months ago I was offered a job from an Irish ad agency called McCain-Erickson to do a billboard for the Heineken Music Festival in Ireland.
This was one of the most fun jobs I’ve been offered since becoming an illustrator. The money was great, the time frame was reasonable, and there was a lot of creative freedom in that I got to explore a different aspect of my imagination. I was also told that the illustration may appear on everywhere from billboards, to subway ads, bus sides, and street banners.
Heineken is doing a year-long music festival celebrating different kinds of music, and they asked me to illustrate “electro pop.”
The examples the art director gave me for musical inspiration were Lady Gaga and “that Gwen Stefani girl.” As I do with most music-based jobs, I listened to a few tracks to get the idea, then found something enjoyable in my iTunes that has a similar feel to me. For this job I chose Strawberry Jam and Merriweather Post-Pavilion by Animal Collective.
Because it was an advertising job and there was a limited amount of time for changes, I chose to be very thorough in the sketch phase; I wanted to leave as little surprise for the client as possible, so I sent PDFs of my sketches along with notes detailing what I wanted to do.
Many of the sketches included in this post were part of the initial PDF I sent to the client for feedback.
My final illustration was “too gray,” according to the art director. I spent another two days tweaking the colors to be more in line with what they said they wanted. In the end, I like both versions for different reasons; the gray version has a great moody feel to it, like it could have come out of a Don Bluth film, and the other has a lot more of a “punch” that I think is more befitting of a billboard.
Supposedly the sign is up in Ireland, though I haven’t had a chance to go see for myself. I’ll mail a sketch to the first person who sends me a picture of it in the environment.
Also, send an email to fstockton@gmail.com to inquire about purchasing the final pencils or inks.
Thanks for reading!
Frank
p.s. I’m now on twitter!
17 Comments
Add Yours →This may be one of my favorite pieces of yours! Similarly, I like both color schemes for different reasons. Congratulations on the billboard!
Also, what dimensions did you work in for something that would be seen this huge (dpi, etc.)?
Hi Jed,
They only asked for it to be 17" wide and 300dpi, but my psd file is about 24" wide at 450dpi.
f.
I love the colors you chose when you reworked it. The scheme overall was wonderful too! Thanks for showing the step by step drawings. They were very interesting to review.
This is really something to be proud of – excellent! Wow – I'm jealous. I NEVER get even a drop of advertising work. Congrats!
Frank, this came out awesome!
Appreciate the info in the post too
-Joel G
Ah, i like this. 🙂
The way you work with sketches, feedback and changes really inspires me. I think the final coloring works best for the theme and for a size that large, but the "grey" one is more "Frank". Nontheless – awesome work, just awesome work. 🙂
Frank, holy damn you chose the right music to listen to! Hah, I immediately pictured some weird combination of Gwen-pop and AC. Congratulations on the sweet job, fantastic work!
Very inspiring work! thank you very much for share the process!
great stuff, i love learning about your process – not just the drawings but the junk you went through behind the scenes. very informative!
as always, a wonderful image. pity they canned the animals, they really put the "summer" in the image and nothing calls for a beer like music in the summer!
Sweet gig , nicely done.
Congrats! It's beautiful… thanks for continuing to show your process – it is a constant source of inspiration
More drapery! Looks great.
Excellent work, I loved looking through the sketches to see how it built up. Must be exciting having your own billboard!
great work, Frank.
Rhaa ! Lovely, wonderful piece as usual.
Frank I'm currently scouring Dublin looking for your Billboard,no luck yet!
I live in Ireland and looked at this poster every day at the bus stop for over a week when the poster was put up (theres two billboards opposite my usual bus stop). I only recently discovered your work via Popgun so had no idea at the time that it was you, but I remember thinking that it was nice to see an actual ILLUSTRATED illustration for once, rather than the usual photo composite works you get on most billboard adverts. Looking at the same poster every day for an hour usually gets a bit boring and grating but this one stayed pleasing and theres a lot of detail in there that I never got bored.
You're definitely an inspiration. Nice to see you mention in another post that you're friends with Tomer Hanuka. That was no surprise as I think you both have similar techniques, especially with the inking and gradients. Very nice from both of you. Great style, keep up the awesome work =)