One of the highlights from the past couple months was getting an email out of the blue from writer and roustabout Sarah Gailey, who had a fun commission request.
Their friend Mallory O'Meara, they said, had a forthcoming book about the world history of women and alcohol. There was a character mentioned therein, they said, named Bessie the Bartender—a mascot of the WWII-era boom in female bar workers. Would I be willing to draw a pro-union propaganda-style poster featuring this fictional babely booze slinger?
YES, YES I WOULD.
The goal was to surprise Mallory with the poster in advance of the book's release, which I think is just about the sweetest thing imaginable. (And now that the poster has reached its destination, I think we can safely say: mission accomplished.)
Anyway, here's a process walkthrough because I actually documented everything fairly well and it's been a long time since I did something like this and I had a lot of FUN.
We started with a Pinterest board of possible reference ideas:
Then I got into the studio and took some reference photos:
It turns out it's really hard to take an appealing-looking photo of someone downing a fictional shot??? But that was the brief for the piece, so I DID MY BEST. When it turned out to be an awkward angle, I thought I'd try for a more face-forward option as well.
Then I took those reference images and drew some sloppy thumbnails on a big sheet of newsprint.
Then it was time to make some art I could send to Gailey. The fun thing about doing mockups with an iPad is that you can just photograph your sketches and then color over them in Procreate. That's how I got these:
We agreed that the diagonal lines and the face-front figure made the best pairing, so I got on with picking a color scheme (based on one of our original reference images) and inking up the art, which got us through to the final design:
While I'd originally figured on lettering the poster by hand, it became clear by the end that it would look really cool to have some more authentic-looking lettering in place. I scooted over to House Industries and used their live preview feature to type up the words I needed for the poster and then grab screenshots to reference. (You can also do this on sites like MyFonts—it's saved my bacon on multiple occasions!)
Since I wanted the poster to be nice and high-res, I used a (free!) Adobe app I'd never heard of before called Capture to take the screenshots and trace them into vector files, which is what you see below.
Note: this felt like an okay thing to do in this instance because the poster was a gift project with no commercial use attached to it. Don't do this if you're making work for sale!! Compensate people for the fonts they make!!! OKAY! GOOD TALK!
Finally, I dropped everything into Affinity Designer (the InDesign alternative I use for doing layout) and made all the background elements look nice and sharp:
I used Capture for some other sneaky stuff to do with this project, but the surprise is still, uh, ongoing, so we'll leave it there for now.
If this piques your interest, you can read more about (and even pre-order) Girly Drinks on Mallory's website! The book comes out October 19th and looks like a ton of fun.
That's all for now,
L
P.S. Wait I lied. The very best part of this job was spending every single moment I was working on it thinking about this video. I share it with you as a gesture of goodwill.