Poster Child
I joined a comic book reading club at the University about three years ago. I think everything about it before, but my idea was to broaden my horizons and read something in a phone that I wasn't really familiar with and wasn't always comfortable with. Also I probably intended to use it to meet girls.
Membership has been pretty static for a while with a lot of people interested but few actually coming to the meetings and doing the reading. In an effort to help remedy this, I started making posters for the comic book club to put up around campus. I made the first one this August, adapting an old WPA poster put out by the government during the Great Depression into a recruitment poster for the comic book. It was a lot of fun; I worked at images before and know a bit of self-taught stuff about Photoshop from my days of making Marathon Infinity mods and maps (and to a lesser extent my periodic flirtations with learning how to draw better using a digital tablet).
Put bluntly, I've always been much better at adapting other people's work than creating something from scratch. When I paint, unless it's an abstract squiggle, I usually will use some kind of a pattern- usually one that I create myself by tracing and retracing an existing figure until it becomes an abstraction and loses most of its connection to its original form. This also makes it much less likely that I will be sued for using someone else's thing without their permission.
So, anyway, making these sorts of posters is right up my alley in place tomorrow I just expects such as they are. I have made a new poster every month Atakapa club, and also some additional posters for other events around the library- stuff like Pet-a-Pup and Library Video Game Day last semester, for instance. By using old posters in the public domain - most of them digitized in high-resolution, glorious collar by the Library of Congress - I avoid any legal entanglements that I'm aware of, and I can focus on altering the picture to suit my own needs.
Most of the time that involves cleaning up the picture to remove its existing copy to create a space where I can put my own, but at times I have done more elaborate. For instance, Library Video Game Day got a poster that was originally a patriotic call to purchase World War I war bonds. I edited the background to remove the copy, changed the sword in Columbia's hands to a videogame controller, and altered the patriotic American seal on the shield to that of the Triforce from Zelda and the imperial emblem from Skyrim.
I have a lot of fun making these posters, enough so that I think I may have been able to swing a career in graphic design - something that never would have occurred to me in high school or as a college student. I'm certainly not thinking of giving up my career as a librarian in order to do something like that, not least of which because I will eventually run out of suitable Library of Congress scans to alter. But it is a fun piece of lateral thinking that allows me to take some of my passions from elsewhere in my life, notably my continued frustration with my ability inability to buckle down and learn how to do serious art, and turn it into a creative endeavor that helps the university and other parties.