Illustration
Poster Design
Merch Design

Creative Direction:
Inara George
the bird
and the bee

In early 2019, one of my top 10 bands of all time, the bird and the bee, followed me back on insta out of the blue. I think it's good to ask for what you want in life, so I messaged them and said "I'd love to make art for y'all!" and they were interested! I got to start with a show poster for their (then) upcoming Van Halen tribute album release show. The main challenge on this was the tight turnarounds, but it ended up working out in the end.

Initial Sketches

I started with some loose thumbnails, which I tightened up to the 6 below. They range from abstractions of the theater hosting the show, to some cartoony birds and bees, to other concepts. The band liked C and E, so I fleshed those out into full illustrations. You can tell I like this font, since I was using it in my poster mockups as well.

Round 2

Not to the fault of anyone, there was a miscommunication in the art direction for this poster, so these sketches, while cute, weren't what was needed for this project. I'd spent the first third of the weekend up to this point developing the previous concepts (the poster's due Monday!), so now there wasn't much time. More confident in the mood of the poster, I went all in on the following design. Luckily, they loved it, and we went back and forth on the type and details for a bit until we landed on the final poster above.

Playing Cards

Coming off the poster, I was pretty stoked, so imagine my excitement when they reached back out to make some merch for the show to accompany the poster. The main piece was a deck of cards featuring portraits of all the musicians from both Van Halen and the bird and the bee. However, this was another tight turnaround. In order to make production deadlines for the printing companies, I was going to have to design the whole deck and ~15 custom portraits over the course of about 4 days. This time is a fun and grueling blur to me, but what matters is we got it done, and on time to boot. Here are some highlights.