In the fall of my junior year at Harvard, my friend Leah Rosen asked me if I could create a poster for her ensemble's upcoming concert, the Harvard Pops Orchestra. The theme: magical forest meets cryptids, and a little bit of... Maurice Sendak? I picked up my brand new Intuos Draw and fired up Photoshop. How hard could drawing trees really be?

Two hours and one heavy hand cramp later: very hard, apparently.

With my friend's infinite patience for iteration, we settled on a final design that incorporated both background elements. I used this project to familiarize myself with Blending Options, which allowed the relatively basic title fonts to fit more seamlessly into the shadowy painted background.

The next poster I designed for Pops was a huge departure from the previous theme – literally. Romeo and Juliet in space! Time to break out the space brushes. I mainly used this nebula brush pack by juanez.

After playing around with the background texture, I worked on the foreground elements:

You can find the final version of the vertical poster on the Harvard Pops poster archive. Below is the horizontal Facebook cover photo version.

My final illustration for the Harvard Pops came in my senior spring: Popscalibur! Think knights of the round table and swords in stones. I don't have as many behind-the-scenes snapshots for this one, but I'm proud of the mixed Photoshop/Illustrator work that I did to illustrate the background and create a vectorized banner with text that followed the banners curves, which I then embedded into the final poster.

A fun and fantastical farewell to my favorite music ensemble on campus!