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How I Learned to Illustrate By Doing It Badly Then Slightly Better Over and Over

The Sacramento Bastille Day Waiter’s Race is a Parisian-themed street party held every July in Sacramento’s burgeoning Handle District. The centerpiece of this event is, of course, its namesake competition. What began in 2010 as a handful of waiters racing trays-in-hand around a block has grown over the years to become a full fledged day party complete with scale-replica Eiffel Tower.

Aside from 2012 when I was unable to produce a new piece and we ran the 2011 poster with updated info, I have designed and illustrated the poster every year. In 2010 I was working full time as art director for Sactown magazine, one of the event’s main sponsors and it was suggested that I take it on as a fun project. The only problem was that in 2010 I wasn’t really much of an illustrator. Sure, I had made a small side career out of designing gigposters for concerts but while very colorful and certainly illustrative, my style was more like collage and element sampling. I had yet to truly illustrate an entire poster. It was something I was interested in branching out into though and working at a bimonthly magazine afforded me time to teach myself how to illustrate while at work. With google image search as my guide I set out to teach myself to illustrate the kind of jazzy minimal French kiosk-style poster I was seeing in my head.