Art Exhibitions and Wild Pears

I guess you could call these my first freelance jobs - only, I didn't get paid; I did them for community service. The first is the logo I created for the Up-2-Date Art Exhibition 2010. The theme for this year's show is "Boots, Bags, Buttons and Bows." For those of you who haven't heard of the exhibition before, it's held at the Up-2-Date store in Coolamon which was listed as a heritage building because it has one of the only cash-carry systems still in tact and still working. The art show has been running for a few years now and we usually have an artist in residence who's works feature in the show and they are able to talk to the public about their works and they run workshops for the community to develop a certain art style. Each year, the show has a theme in which artists can submit works based upon, and they are exhibited in a separate room. Artworks are judged and the best from each category - oils, acrylics, drawings, etc, - receives a prize and then there's an overall judge's/people's choice award. The first design I originally did was a digitalised version of a sketch my aunty did. It was a paper bag with buttons coming out of the top and bow at the front with boots on the bottom. We revised the idea and decided to have a label on the bag which had a boot on it as a watermark and decided instead of a ribbon bow, we'd have a rafia bow (which is a bow made out of strands of yarn/paper) which went better with the paper bag (I actually ended up deleting it so unfortunately I don't have the image to show you the comparison). It turned out well, but the committee wanted something different so they gave me a basic picture of what they wanted so I created it from their idea - something more stylised and sophisticated. I wasn't impressed to begin with, seeing as the first design took quite some time to finish, but when we looked at them both again, we decided that the second design was much better.

The second is the flyer/promotional poster for The Wild Pear's fashion show. I decided on a Moulin Rouge-ish theme for the poster (kind of like Art Nouveau) and personified the pears as models. I admit it's a little rough but the ladies liked it so I'm glad. Both designs were done in Corel Painshop Pro X - I wish I had had Illustrator so the lines and things weren't so wonky. But I'm still happy with the outcome as a whole.