Travis Cumbest Travis Cumbest
Two poster designs repeated side by side in a graffiti-ed sidewalk billboard. Poster one is a tattoo style illustration of an orange skull cleanly separated in half and revealing a realistic floating heart inside. Poster two is an orange type with a dark, thin stroke inside the letter marks on a bright yellow/ tan background that says "St. Paul & the Broken Bones. The Thirsty Hippo. May 19th, 2025. 12:30pm. stpaulandthebrokenbones.com"
A tattoo style illustration of an orange skull cleanly separated in half and revealing a realistic floating heart inside. Above the illustration is orange type with a dark, thin stroke inside the letter marks on a bright yellow/ tan background that says "St. Paul & the Broken Bones." Below the illustration, it reads "The Thirsty Hippo. May 19th, 2025. 12:30pm. stpaulandthebrokenbones.com"
Orange type with a dark, thin stroke inside the letter marks on a bright yellow/ tan background that says "St. Paul & the Broken Bones. The Thirsty Hippo. May 19th, 2025. 12:30pm. stpaulandthebrokenbones.com"

Saint Paul & the Broken Bones Gig Poster

Print, Illustration

St. Paul and the Broken Bones are an 8-piece soul band based in Birmingham, Alabama, and I was tasked with making an event poster for their concert.

This assignment was actually one where I made my first mistakes. I had some very interesting concepts for this, but when it came down to the semi-comps, they just weren’t impressing anyone. I had the concept that a skull would be broken open to reveal a heart in the center. It pays a visceral homage to the idea that when you’re in love, it’s nearly impossible to think with anything other than your heart.

When going back to this project, I knew I needed to hand illustrate this. After researching some reference photos of anatomically correct hearts and bisected heads (a fun thing to do on public Wi-Fi), I printed them out and pulled up one of those old school antique light boxes the size of a microwave. I traced their silhouettes, made some artistic decisions about how the crosshatching would flow into the piece, and placed each part into the composition carefully. I scanned the drawing and took my time in Illustrator vectoring the entire piece.

I was on a tight deadline, so it took me about a full day to hand illustrate the piece and two more days to fully vectorize and layout the poster. In the end, I got a badass poster that left fans excited to grab their tickets before they sold out.