Intern, Timothy Meadows, printing the first plate.

When I’m working on a gigposter, I’m usually digging into the band’s lyrics to find inspiration for a visual idea. In the case of Russian Circles, that isn’t possible. They are an instrumental band. Save for song titles, there are no words involved at all. So the effort is to attempt to capture something about the band.

So this was my first thought. I’m not even sure where this idea came from other than seeing an old black and white head shot on some website where the eyes were blacked out with a black box. I thought it would be interesting to just remove the eyes altogether and cut the type out of this extended forehead. In the end, I just thought it didn’t work so well and didn’t mean anything. You can see I didn’t finish the 3D effect on the type.

I was really struggling trying to find and idea for these guys. I spent the better part of a morning just looking at old magazines, old text books, steel engravings and listening to their music stream on MySpace. I also watched some live videos of the band performing on YouTube. I was pretty much in awe of how much sound they were creating as a three piece. Then I saw this in a book on auto repair:

I started to imagine this ignition distributor as a mysterious machine rising out of the ground, but in a very large scale. I did a quick thumbnail and was pretty convinced I could make this idea work. It would capture that sense of awe I had watching and listening to them play. Big, expansive, layered music made with simple machines. Drums, bass and guitar.

From there is was a matter of execution. I looked at photographic landscapes but quickly abandoned that idea. It could have worked, but would have taken too much time to finesse. I also wanted this to read very quickly, so I tried a more graphic approach to creating a landscape.

The black hole on the white background was not working. It needed some color to ground the image. I roughed in some figures to create the scale I was looking for–knowing I’d need to photograph these myself to get the point of view correct.

The idea was working. The composition was simple and graphic. But it was missing something. It needed another level of visual interest. That lead me to the idea of the glow coming from the hole.

From there it was just a matter of photographing the figures and adding some shading to create a little depth at the bottom of the poster. Well, and working out the type, of course. Here’s the final poster:

It’s been a slow year for posters. This is the first gigposter I’ve done in months. It’ll be a bear to print. In the coming days, I plan on posting about the process of creating this poster, too.

Great deals on posters, note cards and other crap.