Bikefest: Chasing Rainbows Poster Competition

Salutations my friends,

 How's everyone going? I've been working on a few big projects at my casual office job which I'm super pumped about, but more about that in the near future. Today I'd like to share my entry for Bikefest's Chasing Rainbows Poster Competition. 

The brief was to create a poster for the '2012 UCI Track Cycling World Championships' with a vintage twist. The intention was to pay homage to the glory days of cycling posters. The late 1800s was an age of technological and human liberation. Printers were discovering lithographic printing techniques and the public developed a growing fascination with the newest piece of transport, the bicycle.

Some of my absolute favorites from this era are:

Mich Michel Liebeaux

I see him as a pre Jamie Hewlett,

Alphonse Mucha

I love his shameless sense of luxury and excess

and Aubrey Beardsley

You guys know how I feel about flowy lines :-)

 So off I went with thumbnails. I arrived at the sketch below which I thought worked beautifully. The girl rides down a Melbourne street that mysteriously twists into an Olympic bike track. She exudes that subtle French style with the puffy sleeves, tutu skirt and the jaunty hat.

 

I thought it worked well so  I went in and coloured and shaded.

It looked good but something wasn't right. It wasn't working for me becuase there was no clear focal point; there's all this lovely stuff happening with the architecture and the dog in the apple crate. This illustration would probably work nicely as an editorial piece or part of a comic but there was no clear call to action.

I went back to the thumbnails and found this guy below. You might recognize him from my 'Importance of Being Earnest' piece. Though they look similar, he's more an adaptation of the style.

This Gentleman is a flaneur who cruises around Melbourne with his track bike/penny farthing hybrid. I wanted to capture the imagination, excitement and innovation of the late 1800's with this dandy, carefree traveler. The final image is below

I wanted the whole image to have that Beardsley flow which you can see in the tail of his jacket and tips of his fingers. I'm happy with this one, he looks like he's really having a awesome time. Anyway, I'll throw it over to you guys, what do you reckon?

And don't forget check out the submission gallery at The Melbourne Bikefest Website, Facebook and UCI Trackworlds 2012. There are some pretty amazing entries up.

Cheers,

Mete.