The Birch Aquarium gives back to its volunteers when once a year, the Birch staff volunteer to throw a party for the volunteers. This year, the theme is the 50s.

The program cover is always hand drawn, and this year I was asked to design it. So here's one of the versions. I found a handful of different retro fonts, so the other versions use other fonts. Dafont.com turned out to be quite useful.

It's been a while since I did such an extensive pen and ink drawing, comic style. Cross hatching is not my strength; it's easy to get carried away and put in too many lines, resulting in a flat, dark shape. It's also hard to achieve a range of gray scale. I didn't want to deal with cross hatching skin tones, so I did that in photoshop afterwards.