Tee Party Poster

Every year our kids’ Montessori school hosts a big golf fund-raiser. Naturally, I volunteered to do the poster.

Thanks to school administrator Lorraine Scarafile, I got a nice landscape photo of the Bristol Harbour golf course from Rick Stewart, a photographer local to that area. Hmmm... I mused. Nice brochure photo, but as a poster all by itself, both a little low-rez and a little low “zing."

What to do?

I pondered, then remembered Claes Oldenberg, the Swedish sculptor famous for -- Guess what? -- huge renditions of little things. Like a 45-foot steel clothespin that stands near Philadelphia's City Hall.

Okie-doke!

Lorraine gladly supplied me with a handful of their custom-printed golf tees. The toys I borrowed from my kids. I then used a digital camera to shoot each “giant-to-be” element in close-up on a sheet of white seamless paper in my driveway, giving care to match camera and sun angles to the landscape photo. After bringing them all together in Photoshop (faking that logo on my daughter's teapot was fun) -- voila! Giant rubber ducky, giant sand shovel, and a giant "Huzzah!"

I finished up the whole thing using Adobe Illustrator for poster text and page layout.

You like? Personally, I think Claes would approve.

Calendar Covers

For Writers and Books, a local non-profit literary center located in Rochester's blossoming "Art Walk" district, I created a stylized photo collage of their renovated building and landmark sculpture. How many giant #2 pencils are there, you ask? Well, this twenty-footer is actually a #740 Pencil, because that's their street address.

The collage graced the cover of one of their quarterly course catalogs, for which Carol Bassett did the cover design and layout.

The original is shown left, and as printed, right.

I did several more covers, but except for spot color, these were all printed in black and white:

TIP: especially in candid portraiture, if you're after what photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called "The Decisive Moment" (and not too concerned about resolution or sharpness), you can opt to shoot with a video camera. Later, just grab your subjects' most expressive single frames. That's what I did to create the middle (blue mastheaded) calendar cover above.