Dublin 2019 – Dublin by Land, Sea and Air

Acrylic painting on 250 gsm art paper.

I love the vintage British rail posters from the 1890s and onwards and I wanted to create something similarfor Dublin with a genre slant.  The rail posters were more of a British than an Irish phenomenon, but there were a few that featured Irish locations, generally promoting Ireland as a tourist destination.  I ended up using the traditional British look and feel of the footer as that’s so strongly associated with this type of poster.  I had my go at the lettering but the final version uses some far tidier digital lettering!

The view is of the Ha’Penny Bridge over the River Liffey in Dublin.  I then added a tentacle in the Liffey (harking back to the Kraken on the first Dublin 2019 poster), a Martian walking machine from HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds (influenced by Michael Trim’s beautiful design for the cover of the Jeff Wayne musical album), and some flying saucers inspired by the classic SF movie This Island Earth. At one stage the caption was “Dublin – Travel via Metaluna” in reference to the saucers.

The image was used heavily on Dublin 2019 posters including several on display in Dublin comic stores, and was the cover of Dublin 2019 Progress Report #1.

See my Etsy shop for prints and original artwork. You can find updates and Work in Progress pictures on my Facebook Artist page here. 

Original artwork © Iain Clark 2019.

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