This week I'm taking a break from creating tiny glass houses (which are crazy insane) and doing Commercial Art instead, which to me is just as much fun as Fine Art. I've been happily designing a full page ad split between our 2 collective art galleries, to be published in a directory for Hidden In The Hills, an artists studio tour this November.
First I had to come up with the concept of how to visually split a page to show each gallery, how they are different yet similar. I believe cutting a page in half vertically keeps your eye moving up and down the page and is much more dynamic than splitting it horizontally, so that's my basic premise. Since the artists are so important in a collective gallery, I wanted to show some of the artists with their art. For my rough layout I cut & pasted different artists and art from several old ads and layered them on top of each other to see what could fit. Then it was time to arrange the photo shoots. Luckily we have really great, professional photographers in each gallery, Arlon Sieve and Bruce Boyce, who could do the job. I turned the art direction for the Fountain Hills photo shoot over to Jenny Willigrod (pastel painter and head of advertising there) and she and I chose artists and art from each gallery that would look good together and represent different mediums. She's on the left with the flower painting and I'm on the right (with the flower painting) because of course we're going to choose ourselves :-) Using each logo to define a color palette guided both the colors in the art and in the artists clothing to create a warm side and a cool side which separates the ad nicely. The finishing touch was the work of 2 of our abstract artists 'painted' on the floors. Then once each photo was finished I geeked out in photoshop for days, brighting faces and artwork, saturating colors, cutting parts of people out to move them or their art over, adding shadows, making walls recede and artwork pop…. obsessive? Who me? Anyway, I hope you all go out and buy some art today.
Here's the final design on the left and rough draft on the right.
