Pelican
Gig Poster
Gig poster for the melodic metal band Pelican. I wanted to capture the look and feel of the band’s music as well as their existing aesthetic. Since a lot of their imagery uses mountain terrain I wanted to capture a rocky scene. I also wanted to bring my own sinister twist to the look so I went with a chasm with a smoldering meteor at its bottom.
Process
Problem to Solve: Pelican is a melodic Death Metal band with its own unique look and feel. Design a poster that both satisfies Pelican’s unique visual language and remains appealing to fans of the genre at large.
Solution: Pelican’s art uses a lot of rocky landscapes and the genre has a larger artstyle that can be best described as “sinister”. To find mountainous landscape that fits the description I settled on a chasm looking down. I took just the shadows and highlights to really crank up the creepiness factor and added an orange flare at the bottom to draw the eye down the poster.
Research: I compared existing Pelican posters to their album art and listened to a lot of their music to find a visual tone that would best fit the band.
Solo Project
Tools: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign
Timeframe: 1 week (February 2026)
Process and Work: After research, I began by sketching different directions for the poster and receiving peer feedback. When I settled in the direction of the chasm, I needed to make the texture super gnarly to fit the tone. I accomplished this by taking extra craggy rock walls and converting the color grading to grayscale, then shifting the settings to extremes in shading and highlights until I had purely black-and-white pictures of just the rock texture. Then, I took the white spots and painted them over with the color I wanted.