Opera Posters {illustration}

I am in the middle of illustrating the 2012 opera season posters. They appear in the U-T San Diego paper with our coverage of the San Diego Opera. There are four operas every year. Last year was the first time we illustrated them as "posters" and I thought the series was successful, not to mention a blast to work on!  Here are the 4 illustrations from last year all together.

 Clockwise from top left: Carmen, Rosenkavalier, Turandot and Faust.

This year, I decided to take a different approach by adding the name of the opera to the actual illustration. I am loving how they are turning out so far. The first one was Salome - the creepy story of the woman who asked for the head of John the Baptist. She danced a very provocative "dance of the seven veils" for King Herod and he offered her whatever she wanted - dummy! I included some of my color studies, but ultimately the bloody red one won out because of the bloody plot.

Moby Dick was next and how I loved working on this one! The red coming out of his spout was a change I made very late in the process that made me think I was much more clever than I am. I was just playing around with the colors, wondering what other color the bubbles coming out of the whale could be and the red just made sense - again because of the bloody plot!

Next up is Don Pasquale!