MONTERO ALBUM AND TOUR POSTER
Prompt: Make a new album and tour poster for a punk rock Montero album.
PROCESS
For the sketches I based each row off of a different Lil Nas X songs, based on the idea that maybe I would want to change the name of the album to something else. I ended up deciding to stick to the name Montero, but the final product ended up being taken from the Industry Baby row. Due to the punk rock genre I chose, I gave the different parts of the heart different red textures to add an element of DIY, something very popular among punk scenes at the suggestion of a colleague. I made sure each image was different enough to not blend together and look muddy. The chains were removed for that same reason, it added to much detail and was hard to read.
I chose red as the primary color because of how it stands out next to black and white, offering sharp contrast and feeling strong.
With the heart motif chosen, the other elements such as a bow and arrow as reference to Cupid came naturally
When it came around to the poster, I wanted to take inspiration from the Montero music video and its use of christian iconography. While sketching I focused on christian symbols and twisting them in some way, and I ended up landing on The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo, but replacing Adam with Lil Nas, and replacing God creating Adam with the Devil giving Nas his heart. I came up with the tour name "Heart of Eden" expanding on the heart concept from the album cover, while also referencing the garden of Eden, where Lil Nas was at the start of the music video.
I switched from a pure red color scheme for more analogous, letting other hues like orange and yellow come in to make it feel less one note. the DIY element was kept, adding more texture.
FIRST DRAFT
During the draft phase, for both the album and the poster, the DIY texture element was not present yet. I had two ideas for the album, one being the heart, and the other being him going down the stripper pole. While I liked the stripper pole idea, when shrunken down to the size it would be on an album, the design became muddy and cluttered, while the heart scaled a lot easier. For those reasons, I chose the heart, and added those textures to the parts of the heart.
With the poster, the main problem that needed fixing, besides the addition of those textures, was the spacing with the sun. The sun and text are really close to each other, and made it feel claustrophobic with no room to breath. The sun was made smaller and higher up, giving the text more room, and I removed the blood on Nas's chest and on the Devil's hands, as even with texture it looked tacky and unnecessary. It also made it confusing who the heart was coming from, it was supposed to be the Devil's heart but with Lil Nas bleeding, it gives the implication it's actually his heart that he ripped out from his chest, which wasn't what I was going for.