ILLUS5020: A Poster for a band that does not exist

The band name I got was Fungal Pandemic, strangely enough it felt very relevant for this year to get such a band name. It feels like to me as a good way to relieve me of my stress that this year has brought me on so far.

The first thing I immediately wanted to think about was the feeling the band name gave me, particularly with genre. It feels very punk-ish, maybe a bit psychedelic. Like a modern band that tries to imitate genres popular from the 60s and 70s, a bit of a genre jumper maybe? Going for chaos perhaps like the year at hand.
So with that in mind I decided that this band would have something a bit greusome, a bit grotesque as their poster. 

www.pinterest.co.uk/pibis_/fungal-pandemic/

Firstly though I looked into mushrooms that I could use, a lot of the ones I found were the type that grew on trees, I began to be fascinated with the fact that fungus really do spread like an infection, I mean humans can develop fungal infections so my brain was sort of going down that route so far. 

Here are a select few of the illustrations and photos I found on pinterest, there were obviously more. A lot of them felt very cutesy, which I can see. Little toadstools can be quite cute, sure. But I definitely wanted something a bite more... raw? gorey? Perhaps? 

Then an idea struck me. Zombies. It all started when I remembered a video I watched on youtube at some point during lockdown about freaky things in nature. As it turns out, there is a fungus that can take over and control minds, but only the minds of ants, luckily. It works the same as a zombie though, the ant dies and the fungus continues on its legacy by controlling its body. It's kind of creepy that there's such a thing that exists in this world, its very lucky for us that it only controls ants... for now. 

Another influence behind this idea was the game The Last Of Us. The game has zombie like creatures that used to be human but are infected with a fungus like disease that much like the fungus that takes over ants, it completely controls a human's mind and takes over their body too. It all felt very fitting to the theme of Fungal Pandemic, and I thought it would be a central theme to the band. 

​www.pinterest.co.uk/pibis_/band-poster-brief/

I decided at this point to make a second board on pinterest and look up some zombie related graphics. Unsurprisingly zombies are very popular to draw and a lot of the graphics I found were very similar to the images I was already coming up with in my head. A lot of bright colours, a mix of greens, pinks and purples would be good and eyecatching for the viewer. I had a vision of something graphic and gory but the colours are quite pop-ish in nature and bright as a sort of contrast to the darker theme. Also in general I don't really like zombies, they're the one thing that genuinely scares me in concept so I wanted to at least mess around with some brighter colours. 

Below are a select few drawings I found to stand out for me from the board! 

I also decided to generate some colour palettes based on the pinterests using a website I found called Coolers, I've been using it quite a bit recently for my personal work, it's a great way to find colours you wouldn't usually consider. I used different terms such as pop and zombie to find other palettes too that other people had created. It's a handy little resource to find different colour palettes you might want to use and a convenient way to see a colour mood you're trying to achieve before you even fully put colour to paper.