This assignment was to make a poster for an opera from a selected list for Opera Philadelphia. The poster needed to show off a visual metaphor that combines both the image and the text into one. I chose the opera Pagliacci to be the subject of my poster. This is an opera about a performer finding out his wife is cheating on him and how it breaks him both on the inside and out. I worked in the visuals of a man putting on clown makeup, a "happy face", with a shattered mirror to show his psyche and wellbeing breaking into little pieces.
Final Poster Design for Pagliacci
Outside Bus Station Poster Mock-up
Moodboard for piece inspiration. I took a lot of inspiration from the shattered mirror concept. The title character is also a performer and clown, so I went with the visuals of a pierrot, a type of pantomime and comedy character seen often in late seventeenth century Italy.
Rough sketch ideas for the posters composition. I had a lot of focus on the mirror trope, but I also wanted to explore imagery with Nedda, Pagliacci's adulterous wife who he ends up murdering in the finale by stabbing with a knife.
More conceptual attempts, drawing from the broken dressing room sketches . I tried to experiment with the differentiation with black and white and color, as well as text placement and its relationship with the cracks.
