Billy Joel Poster

This weekend I finished designing this poster for a contest that was being held.  In 1987 Billy did a tour in Russia called "A Matter of Trust" The Bridge to Russia, and they are releasing a documentary about it and a whole package of music and other items.  So CreativeAllies was holding a contest to design a poster for this.  Because I am such a Billy Joel fan I decided to give it a try.  I took a graphic designs class in 2008 and learned to use Adobe Illustrator and was rusty of course. So I broke out my books, signed up for a year of Creative Cloud Adobe Illustrator, one doesn't need to buy the program anymore...it's on the cloud and you don't have to come up with $200.00 to purchase the program, you pay by the month and also when there is an upgrade it's right there, I thought that was a grand idea. 

I enjoy his song Leningrad and decided to research the reasoning about why it was written. If I understand it right he met this man in Russia who it sounded had a rough life and one of his great pleasures was to be a clown and make children laugh.  The music sounds so Russian and slow and heavy.  So when this contest was announced I decided to use the image of the music for this song as the background.  

I used a layer of smoke and made it transparent so that the music would not blare out and to give it some movement.  I made the text in 3-D.  And used the pen tool to draw a path around the picture of the present Billy and his microphone and piano and filled it in with black.  

So when I saved this, I had to flatten it (something I had to read up on) because of the transparency layer.  I didn't totally understand why but I did it.

I am very happy with my design, it is how I pictured it and I think "not bad, the last time I used Illustrator was more than two years ago".  I worked my way through it.  I saved this to the correct format that was needed for the web "EPS".

The only thing I didn't think about was that I needed to unlink the picture I used for Billy Joel.  When I uploaded it onto CreativeAllies site that picture came with it.  I have since unlinked it from my file but I can't do anything about on their site.  Oh Well, it's a learning process.  I am the only poster that has a picture attached to it., I guess it will stand out.

I do not expect to win by all means.  There are others out there that are just fabulous!  But I had fun doing it.  I love using Illustrator, it is such a great program. 

So please check it out and look at all the great entries, you will be able to spot mine really easily.  ;-)