Creating 'The Hypochondriac' poster

In an age when you can download anything from the internet, copyright of images is always a problem. So when I designed the posters for Newport Playgoers' 88th Season (2011/12) I decided to create a series of posters that had a corporate look, each one featuring an original piece of artwork.

For some weird reason I actually designed the posters chronologically working my way through from the first to the last in the season. So the final one I did, with a sigh of relief, was for 'The Hypochondriac'. This was great fun to do - and not just because it was the last of nine posters. The play is a hilarious re-working by legendary Liverpool poet Roger McGough of Moliere's classic comedy. I knew it needed a caricature face - an anxious man suffering from 'le malade imaginaire' (that's your actual French).

I spent a long time drawing various pen and ink versions of the face until coming up with one that I was happy with, complete with worried expression and nightcap. After scanning it into my PC, I set about adding colour using a marvellous (free) program called Artweaver. Much like Photoshop, it enables you to work in layers and employ various brushes to get different styles.

Once the hypochondriac himself was finished I set about drawing various medicine and pill bottles - the shape of which I researched on the internet. Again these were scanned in and coloured. Finally I put all the artwork together using Adobe InDesign, jigging the ingredients around until I had the poster below.

For more information about 'The Hypochondriac' visit http://newportplaygoers.wordpress.com
If you want to try out Artweaver you can download it here: http://www.artweaver.de/