My Process:

 For my poster, I wanted it to pertain to a topic that is lighthearted but something I’m still passionate about. The first idea that came to mind for me was my love for pineapple on pizza, but I wanted to think of something that is (a) discussed a little less and (b) hopefully a little less contentious. I have always been and will always be a ketchup supporter, but I’ve noticed that the older I get, the less people around me use it and, furthermore, act as if it’s an “inferior condiment.” Because it’s something I haven’t seen anyone else do, I knew that there was a lot of creativity to explore with this, but I knew that I wanted to incorporate the look of ketchup into it somehow. After testing out a couple of concepts, I settled on my phrase for the poster (“Ketchup: a condiment for everyone and everything) and the design elements (ketchup-covered food items).

I found the font “Copperplate”, which is open source and a lot like the font Heinz uses for their branding, so I decided to use that for the type elements of my poster. Everything else has been drawn using the curvature pen tool, reference images, and a lot of attention to detail. The word “everything” was also written out with the curvature pen tool, but I also used the Width tool to adjust the width of the lines and make it seem like it was authentically written with a ketchup bottle. I also added a very slight drop shadow to the word to give the impression it was coming off the paper the way real ketchup on paper would. The textures to the background, namely, the grain texture and the paper texture, were both images that I found online. I download them, placed them in an empty rectangle over the rest of the poster, and adjusted the opacity and overlay styles to make it seem more authentic. The highlights on the ketchup came from an inspiration image that I found of actual ketchup. When it’s hit directly with light, ketchup generally keeps its red saturated tone but has stark white highlights around the edge that reflect light, so to depict that authenticity in my poster while also maintaining my art style, I went around my ketchup elements and included some stark white lines that indicated highlights.

What I Learned: 

I’m very happy with how this poster came out. It was on a topic I’m fond of, I enjoyed looking up more information about ketchup when starting this project, and the poster feels in line with my art style. It also gave me the opportunity to focus on skills I want to work on, such as attention to detail and adding lighting effects to my art, which I always appreciate.