Artist Statement
For my poster assignment I decided to create a poster for The Ellen Degeneres Show. If you have ever watched this show, you know that it will always make you laugh and smile. I wanted to try and imitate those moods into something visual.
The target audience of my poster are viewers of the show already and hopefully attract a younger demographic such as teens to watch the show. The usual advertisement posters for The Ellen Degeneres Show consist of her logo with her posing in it. I do think that those posters are effective, but I wanted to give a more cartoon, younger vibe to my poster. I started out by thinking of the staple items that represent her show the most. The red chairs stood out in my mind the most. But I did not just want to have them sitting there, so I added an other item that Ellen gives to most of her male guest… Underwear. Because of the silliness of the show, the underwear suited my poster well.
I started out on Photoshop and created the red chairs and the underwear first. To do so I used the pen tool to create a path, then fill it with colours. I took a picture from online and created a new layer on top of it to draw the chairs. This step took me a while since I had to create so many different parts of the chair and make sure it was shaded properly.
As for the text, I decided to use a fun bubbly font. I tried using slimmer styles of lettering but the boldness of this font just made all the text pop more. The blue background has great contrast with the yellow and white text. To make the letters stand out more, I added an overlay to give dimension.
I wanted the text on my poster to have a good sense of alignment. I made ‘’Ellen’’ the biggest since it is the main product I am advertising for. I then just built the other sentences on top, and gave them different sizes to make it more interesting to the eye. The background layer of the repeating word Ellen, in my opinion gives the whole poster dimension and ties in well the entire poster.
All the colours together give a great sense of positivity and have great contrast with each other. The yellow gives brightness, the blue represents the colour already given to the show, the red stands out immediately and the white is simple and because I already had 3 dominant colours, I did not want to over do it.
Before designing this poster, I had a totally different idea in mind, but once I started creating the chairs, I knew I had to use them. I had some difficulty drawing them well so that they looked like the real ones on the show, and same goes with the underwear. One thing I learned while doing this project is to make sure to create a new layer for everything, or even start a new page for every element. The goal of my poster was to make people laugh, and smile and want to watch the show. I believe that with all my design elements I successfully created a poster that represents The Ellen Degeneres Show very well.
Carina Kresic 