After creating the Steamboat Cowboy Downhill promotional materials for more than a decade it is becoming harder and harder to come with fresh ideas.  This year I decided to try something different.  I was inspired by Boulder, CO artist Steve Lowtwait.  I just love his use of flat color and simple shapes.   His posters have a real old school vintage feel that I thought would work well with the cowboy theme and the CBDH logo that we have been using for the last 3 years.  Unfortunately, our budget would not allow me to hire Steve to create an illustration for us.  So I decided to try to design a poster similar to his painting style using Adobe Illustrator Live Paint.  With Live Paint you can select the number of colors you want to fill shapes with, then  AI automatically “traces” the image.  You can control smoothness and detail of the outline.  Once the outline and fill is completed you can add texture and lighting to the fills if needed.  You can also delete fills within the outline to make the illustration simpler.  I selected some photographic images taken from last years event and started experimenting with color levels, composition and layout.   I thought the 3 options I came up with were all good designs.  But in the end the client did not see it my way.  They preferred the more traditional approach.  I submitted 2 more designs and of course the last one was approved.