Grisen kommer!
Here is the poster for next years New Years Variety Show. The title Grisen Kommer is a wordplay on Finnish pronunciation of Grisen as it could be heard as krisen kommer (the crisis is coming), but literally it means the pig (as in Svine flu) is coming. There is no such thing as being racist if it’s against Finnish people.
Monopoly pig!
The idea behind this poster was that they wanted Mr. Monopoly, but as a pig. Atleast that was the instructions by the end of the process, the first instructions I got this year was that they wanted speed, money and a pig. Since I have a lot of material I thought I could show the process leading up to the final poster. I started with about 20 sketches of pigs in various poses, and settled for one of them:
Action pig!
I also did two other suggestions as precaution, since the first suggestion I come up with rarely is accepted. This is a quick sketch of an 2010 inpired poster:
Pigs in Space!
And finally I did one quick sketch of an idea that resembles the 50′s sci fi invasion film posters. This would of course be the most work to put together, therefore I’m happy they didn’t choose this one.
Pigs came from Outer Space!
After some discussion, they decided that I should move forward with suggestion No.1. In their feedback they also suggested to put a top hat and mononocle on the pig to make him look rich. I sat down and tried to make the pig richer, but everything turned into lazy iconograpy excercises. Instead I started working on a colour look for suggestion No.1.
This was one of the first thing I tried.
And then I tried something less colorful.
As a total I created about five different colour ideas before I gave up and just started playing around. Then suddenly this idea came to me:
Che!
I was quite happy with this version as I thought it had everything requested, except for a top hat and a mononocle. At this time though, a top hat had become priority number one and Mr. Monopoly was mentioned in the feedback I got.
Back to the drawing board for me. After a quick Google search for Mr. Monopoly (my family is more of a Pictonary family) I found out what he looked like and did the final poster in about two hours, mourning the wasted hours spent on action pig.