Denver Art Museum Poster
This poster was originally part of a series of illustrations created for the Real Estate issue of Colorado Homes & Gardens Magazine in 2008. They were used on the intro pages for each section of the magazine to show the variety of places in Colorado. The magazine wanted to use my simplistic retro “travel poster” style for each of the illustrations. The four sections in the issue include Denver, The Front Range, The Mountains, and The Western Slope. This poster includes Mt. Evans in the background, the Denver skyline, and the Denver Art Museum in the foreground. The typography was also meant to look retro within the piece. Created in Adobe Illustrator, I am able to enlarge and reduce the illustration without loss of quality. I call this the “travel poster” look which is a simplistic graphic illustration style but with more gradations than the old world travel posters from the 1930’s and 40’s.
The process: I first create rough sketches. Then I tighten up each part as a pencil sketch and scan the drawing into the computer. I then use this scan as an underlay importing it into Adobe Illustrator. Each part of the image is created as a shape and eventually I fill the shapes in with color. After the color palette is established, I then create simple gradations to allow the image to have some depth. This piece has been printed as a giclee on watercolor paper. Colorado Homes & Lifestyles magazine is written for Colorado homeowners. Each issue of Colorado Homes & Lifestyles magazine features articles about architecture, design and decorating, entertaining, luxury real estate and more. It has been developed as part of my Colorado Vintage Travel Poster series.
Top 5 Award: Colorado Alliance of Illustrator’s High 5 Show
Voted one of the Top 5 Pieces in the Exhibition for the Denver Art Museum poster. The illustration was originally created for the Colorado Homes and Gardens Magazine – Real Estate Issue.
April/May 2009, Denver, Colorado
The Denver Art Museum (DAM) is an art museum located in the Civic Center of Denver, Colorado. The museum is one of the largest art museums between the West Coast and Chicago.
The Frederic C. Hamilton Building
The newest addition to the Denver Art Museum is the Frederic C. Hamilton Building, which holds the Modern and Contemporary art collection, along with the Architecture and Design collection, and Oceanic art collection. The unique building also serves as the main entrance to the rest of the museum complex. This ambitious project doubled the size of the museum, allowing for an expansion of the art on view, inside a bold aesthetic facade.
The complex geometric design of the Hamilton building consists 20 sloping planes, covered in 230,000 square feet of titanium shingles. The angular design juts in many directions, supported by a 2,740-ton structure that contains more than 3,100 pieces of steel. One of the angled elements extends 100 feet over the street below. None of the 20 planes is parallel or perpendicular to another.
The design uses many extended angular planes to be reminiscent of the natural landscape. Similar to the peaked roof of the Denver International Airport, the Hamilton building emulates the sharp angles of the nearby Rocky Mountains, as well as the geometric crystals found at the mountains’ base near Denver. Daniel Libeskind, architect of the building, said “I was inspired by the light and geology of the Rockies, but most of all by the wide-open faces of the people of Denver.” The titanium panels also reflect the light of the Colorado sunshine.
Mount Evans is the featured mountain in the background. Mount Evans is a 14,265-foot mountain in the Front Range region of the Rocky Mountains, in Clear Creek County, Colorado. It is one of 53 fourteeners (mountains with peaks over 14,000 feet) in Colorado, and the closest fourteener to Denver. It is often compared to Pikes Peak — another Front Range fourteener within a short distance of a major city — which it exceeds in elevation by 154 ft.
The peak is one of the characteristic Front Range peaks, dominating the western skyline of the Great Plains along with Pikes Peak, Longs Peak, and nearby Mount Bierstadt. Mount Evans can be seen from over 100 miles away to the east, and many miles in other directions. Mount Evans dominates the Denver Metropolitan Area skyline, rising over 9,000 feet above the area. Mount Evans can be seen from points south of Castle Rock, up to (65 miles south) and as far north as Fort Collins (95 miles north), and from areas near Limon (105 miles east). In the early days of Colorado tourism, Mount Evans and Denver were often in competition with Pikes Peak and Colorado Springs.