The Golden Dragon
Melbourne Theatre Company
While working as an in-house graphic designer at Melbourne Theatre Company, I was given the opportunity to create illustrated campaign artwork for this ensemble play, set in a Chinese-Thai-Vietnamese restaurant. An illegal worker is suffering excruciating pain from a toothache, hence the wild imagery.
Campaign image
Created traditionally, the main image is executed in ink, watercolour and conté. During the evolution of the work, the concept and composition were revised several times, and I made high resolution scans at every point in the process. This meant I ended up with several versions of the image which could be mixed and matched to some extent to give us a more flexibility for its use across the campaign collateral.
Indoor and outdoor signage
Indoor theatre foyer poster (design with large red polygon) and outdoor ‘rock’ poster. The latter always utilised simpler designs for ease of comprehension for drivers flashing past in their cars.
Postcard and press ads
The image was masked out of its original background so that it was more versatile across quite differently-shaped containers.
From concept to final art
The initial concept for the image was a tooth engraved with a dragon. It eventually transmogrified into a 3D form wrapped around the tooth. The design of the dragon is a cross between Chinese and western styles. A combination of yellow and red was considered, as well as monochrome, but eventually a striking combination of black, red and white was settled on.