A poster for the kitchen

I’m not sure how we’ve lived in our house close to seven months now but still got so little art on the walls. So here’s a poster I made for the kitchen. I’ll mull it over for a few days and then print it on a mid-size canvas.

The mug started out in Illustrator. It’s just six strokes: one for the outline of the mug, another for the rim, three for the yellow highlights and a fatter tapered stroke for the coffee itself. The steam are five further pen strokes.

I imported it into Photoshop where I overlaid it with the warped text for ‘Man does not live by coffee alone’, and the ‘Have a Danish’ line, plus the red and blue fields at the bottom of the canvas. The mug itself has no fill so I had to cut out the part behind the mug from each of these so they didn’t show through.

The goal was a fifties diner look, as much in the imperfectly aligned parts as in the fonts and design itself, so I’ve used filters to scuff it up and simulate mis-registered red and blue plates.