Opera Fairbanks 2012

One of the long-distance clients I've retained is doing the annual "Run of the Valkyries" tshirt/poster for Opera Fairbanks (see last year's design here). This one marked the 5th year anniversary of the event, and as such they wanted a remix of everything so far. So here's the whole gang... minus a sled-dog, who was sacrificed in the name of preserving compositional symmetry. Which worked out kind spiffy in the end, since a command decision was made to keep costs down for the tshirts by going with a one-color print, which in turn enabled the addition of a small tag-print on the back (see the cute little catch-up pooch posted below).

Concept sketch

Preliminary color proof

B&W Line art for Tshirt

Pulled a Promethean push on the ol' learning curve for Illustrator on this gig, more often than not juggling files between that program and Photoshop just to try and get something close to what I wanted. Times like this I really miss the old Freehand. Compounding the fun was discovering that somehow none of my original archived artwork for this particular client made the migration here with me, and so it meant starting all over from scratch, as opposed to the time-saving shortcuts afforded by recycling certain aspects. There was a last-minute revision with the addition of a new sponsor, and as per the usual MO in brainstorming ideas, a couple other good concepts were hatched and consequently mothballed for potential future usage. The initial pen & ink drawings and concept sketches were actually done amidst the last two weeks of the MFA insanity, and lay fallow for another month before picking up the trail of digital breadcrumbs again under more ideal conditions. In other words, not getting as much hiking done - but guessing it'll be life imitating art here pretty soon... (minus the viking helmet).