The first run of the Greatest Story Never Told has come to a close. Not only was it successful, but it was also a lot of fun! Watching little kids' various reactions to immersing themselves in the imaginary world of TGSNT was both hilarious and amazing.
I attended four of the performances to illustrate the stories the children made up each time. As an illustrator for the show, my job was to produce eight drawings for each show I attended in the following 48 hours, to then be added to a transcription of the story. The final product being a book that the children helped to make. My approach at first was that I was going to do embellished figure studies, but the pacing of live improve proved to be far too quick for such a thing. I ended up doing quick thumbnail sketches of the scenarios as they played out. At home I fleshed out the sketches first as ink drawings and later as renderings in illustrator. The first two sets of drawings I made were okay, but not as interesting as I wanted them to be.
To me they felt more like storyboards than completed pieces, but, given the time frame for turnaround, it was a valiant effort.
For the last two performances I decided to scrap the time frame and try to make something more exciting. The first of these turned out okay, but still wasn't as exciting to me as what I hoped for. I tried layering with drop shadows to give a sort of cut-out look, but it still doesn't quite work for me in retrospect, as far as a complete body of work goes.
On the final performance, I finally worked out the formula I was looking for. Referring to mid-century European poster design, I was able to quickly assemble a cohesive set of minimal yet dynamic compositions in Illustrator and Photoshop. The end result is an approach that feels both contemporary and vintage. The constraints of keeping the elements simple lead me to rely on the basic shapes provided by Illustrator, which lead me to think about the composition in a much different way than I usually do. It's somewhat similar to the approach I found in the more successful illustrations I made for Cramer Krasselt's Westwood College campaign.
I'll definitely be revisiting this style in the future, and hopefully working on more editions of The Greatest Story Never Told.
