Some more work for my illustration portfolio, this one began life as a digital portrait of hip-hop artist Yasiin Bey, based on a Wiki Creative Commons image but as I worked on it, it felt like it would be a good basis for a gig poster - there was a lot of copy space conveniently located to the right of the image. After a quick search I found that Yassin was playing on the 19th of the following month, so decided to use this as an opportunity to mock it up as a full gig poster.

The colour palette was based on what might be described as earthy. Originally I had something planned for the background involving brickwork, but the image became far too cluttered, so I picked a background wash based on  that brick-red so common in Yasiin's hometown, Brooklyn NY (I had visited relatives there as a kid). I couldn't get the graf-style text quite right by hand, so in the end the type was based on a maniupulated font, just editing parts of it to keep it energetic and unstructured.