Baby's First Rodeo is Philly's Monthly Cosmic Country night. I first designed a poster for a show that ended up getting canceled. That was done primarily in Canva, by hand, and using Illustrator for some finishing touches. I wasn't good enough at it yet to use it the whole time.

Then, I was asked to do a poster for the Jayme Wyatt show with Baby’s First Rodeo. This was the first poster I did entirely in Illustrator. I really love the bold colors and appreciate BFR being down for that. I’d change a couple of things in retrospect. I’d use a bigger margin, and I would try a texture on the hat, hair, and shirt.

The next several posters for Baby’s make heavy use of the Retro Supply Company (RSCO) textures to give them that heavy paper feeling. For the Kristina Murray and Nathan Xander posters, I used very bright colors. The Nathan Xander poster also uses RSCO colors from their Risograph print package. I’ve been experimenting with that package but have yet to make a Risograph style print for Baby’s. BUT, I love the colors for their Japanese Print Shop style of Riso.

I really love the Agalisiga Chuj Mackey poster. Because I’m doing a lot of these now and have a day job/other design obligations, I’ve started drafting out posters when I have ideas even if I do not have any information for the next show. For this one, I originally had a draft where it was just one bucking horse with a rider and a person in boots with one foot on the record and one foot kicking the record along.

This was a classic example of an overdesigned idea. I did go in that direction originally but quickly disliked the asymmetry and found it to be kind of busy. I also started this design as a Risograph print, which requires settings that reveal the overlap of objects. I ultimately found the design wasn’t served by Riso but I did continue to play with revealing the overlap in the horses. These have no opacity aspect, however, which they would have if I’d used Riso. Instead, I used the pathfinder tools to cut out overlapping areas and did solid fills of contrasting colors.

Color was my last design choice. I was looking for a way to incorporate Cherokee symbolism because the main performer, Agalisiga Chuj Mackey, is a member of the Cherokee Nation. I found that there are colors associated with the seven sacred directions. Generally, seven colors is too many in a simple poster design. So, I picked four and went with that.

I really love the primary colors and feel very connected to those colors for my own reasons. In my home, I have Chinese embroidered silk horse figurines that are in primary colors. They were left to me by my grandmother, and I’ve often thought of using them as design inspiration. So it is fun to have found my way to a design like them through a different avenue. I have no idea where she got them but she is from Panama and her father was Chinese and worked in trade on the canal. So, perhaps they came from him!