Kallquist Guitars illustrations

It all started with a conversation with Brisbane luthier Luke Kallquist about his beautifully crafted 'GUN' electric guitar and his love of Spaghetti Western movies.  I thought it might be interesting to try and capture his guitar in the style of an old Western Movie Poster.

As displayed in an earlier post, I really love the old style illustrated movie posters and this project gave me a crack at trying to create one of my own. The combination of guitars, movie posters and painting let me indulge in my personal interests resulting in a project which I honestly loved doing from initial pencil sketch (which I have attached below) through to picking up the final printed piece.

One consideration was to limit or avoid doing digital retouching to the painted artwork and keep it as authentic as possible. After scanning, the only photoshop work done was in adding the smaller character boxes, positioning the GUN heading and positioning the outside border line. These were elements which I illustrated separately and then had to combine for the layout.

The initial aim was to produce a poster with the painted image but along the way the idea of doing a T-shirt screen print was born and a more graphic, one colour, Saul Bass inspired version of the illustration was created. By the end we produced A2 size posters, postcards and T-shirts.

You can check out the handiwork of Kallquist Guitars at www.kallquistguitars.com