Bowl ’24

So Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Sudbury is going back to their Bowl For Kids Sake fundraiser for the first time since the 2020 event was cancelled to Covid. They ask me for a teaser. It’s coming up. May 24.

What’s your theme, I ask. They don’t know yet. Just make a generic one for now.

I’ll do you one better.

Will anyone get it?

We’ll see.

In my ideal world, someone will question… “Why did you post a picture of a bowl?”.

“Wait. A bowl? As in… ARE YOU BRINGING BACK BOWL FOR KIDS SAKE!?!?!?!”

It may or may not play out that way. One can hope. I’ll keep this blog updated as it develops.

March 13, 2024

Had to give it a bit of a nudge, but people started to catch on. Maybe more patience was needed, as the agency went and posted the next image when it seemed like nobody was getting the “bowl” teaser. But that’s okay. People are starting to talk.

The little anthropomorphic bowling ball is so well known among the die-hards that they don’t even need to see “Bowl For Kids Sake” to know what it is. I suppose the fact that, at its core, it’s a bowling ball… also gives the game away.

So, the theme, I’m told will be “carnival”. Carnival. Circus. Oh, yeah. I can work with that. The question is, will the agency let me take our little clown a little deeper into Heath Ledger “Joker” territory than your typical more wholesome clown? (are any clowns really wholesome… really?)

March 14, 2024

I’d thought to go full Joker with scrawled on green hair or even a big puff of hair and maybe more makeup. But, once I got the flower and trampy bowler hat on there, it really seemed enough.

This poster is still in “teaser” territory. Will I leave it simple, on white? Or will I use the pin as the basis for a big top tent and turn this into a garish monstrosity? I’m not sure. That’s a worry for another night.

March 22, 2024

“Could I get the full bowling package soon? Please? Pretty please? Pretty pretty pretty please?”

Okay, I may have embelleshed that a little, but that’s in essence the message I got. Which meant it was time to accelerate the process and get the full poster created. I’d envisioned doing something with a bowling pin holding up the inside of a circus tent, and I downloaded a circus tent interior stock photo to that end, but as I started playing with it, I knew I’d have to make the clown-ball-head much too small.

Generally, I like to have a bowling pin in the poster. It’s not a “rule”, nobody’s enforcing it. It’s just something that I like to make sure I have. So, where’d it fit? In the “O” of “Bowling”. Get some textures in the “Bowl For Kids Sake”. The same grunge texture went in “Bowl” and “For Kids Sake”, so the words “Bowl For Kids Sake” would flow. But at the same time, the yellow/orange in both “Big Top” and “Bowl” ensured that “Big Top Bowl” could flow properly too. I’d been sloppy adding shading to the flower in the first pass, so that got some more care. And as I stared at it, I wondered if I wanted a slap-on poster sticker to get the details on… but then I thought “what if I played with the idea of a poster being ripped off the wall instead?”

So, there you go. This year’s Bowl For Kids Sake poster. There’ll be more collaterals to go with it, but this is the dominant image of this year’s campaign… and it feels like a worthy addition to the lineage.