DAVID WHITCHER
My clients were primarily bars and restaurants, the steadiest of which was
a tavern catering to the college crowd called the Old Main Inn
The idea was to be funny, irreverent, and definitely come off as the coolest bar in a town full of them
The managers and or owners would tell me what they wanted to plug and rest, (art, layouts, and humor) was generously left up to me
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I started taking a camera into the bar and snapping pictures of the clientele which I then incorporated into the hand-drawn ads. The result was very effective as people would go straight to the ads and pore over every inch to see if they or their friends made it into the ads
There were always a lot of inside jokes, and once people got the idea, I got a lot of attention whenever I showed up with my camera. Much photo bombing way before the concept became popular. Lots of word of mouth generated by a few ads that really stuck out
The Pen is Mighty
These are samples of hand-drawn ads done back in my college town of Fredonia, New York around the mid 80's
This two-week strip satirizing Mario Cuomo was one of my favorites. The Governor had recently raised the drinking age in New York to the great consternation of the various local Bar Czars. Although he was he was a popular figure at the time, and a potential presidential canidate, it was time to take revenge
I always tried to stay topical, as with these two ads which followed up on the U.S. air strike against Libya, and the Tylenol tampering scare
There were always lots of inside jokes associated with the local bar wars. Here, among other jibes, the owner of BJ's,
the other big college bar in town, looks in the window
Not to be outdone, BJ's kindly reciprocated with an ad of their own
A big theme for a lot of the ads was live music which happened often. Here are some examples
A side benefit of this was that I got to know many of the bands and wound up designing some album covers and stage backdrops
Here are some ads I did for other local businesses.
A restaurant called Taco Junction was another steady account
They were also looking for a certain shock appeal as the ad to the left demonstrates.
While in very questionable taste, (so were the tacos as I recall) it still got a lot of laughs and generated a lot of buzz
Just for fun, this is a pen and ink drawing done in the same period entitled "Bowling for Madonnas"
More pen work. This one is called "Cats in Spaghetti"
If you're interested
in clever, funny and
unique hand-drawn
ads to really set your
business apart
please contact
me to discuss my
reasonable rates