Management is taking a music appreciation class this semester and one of the assignments this week was to design a promotional poster for an opera. She chose Madame Butterfly, a truly tear-jerking one if there ever was one, and after we sat and sketched out her ideas I plunked myself down in front of the old laptop and fired up Gimp and Inkscape.

She wanted to get across Butterfly’s sense of hope, a hope tied deeply to a notion of renewal, so she decided that cherry blossoms would be the best representative object since they embody spring. We found this low resolution image…

For Butterfly herself, Management wanted get across the crushing sense of loss that has filled her life since she was a little child. The image of the butterfly was a little better…

With a handful of doodles and these images we worked to piece it together, finally arriving at this…

We used Inkscape to trace the base images to bitmaps and then proceeded to work them over for color, layering, and transparencies alternating between Gimp and Inkscape. The text was generated and layered in Inkscape. Considering neither of us have any graphic design training I’m pretty damn proud with how this came together.