Spleodar Halloween Arts Festival

This was the sixth year we had the pleasure of working with Nenagh Arts Centre on the brilliant Spleodar Festival. Each year, a fun and exciting theme is created for the festival, which we use as the inspiration and foundation for all of our designs and illustrations. This year’s theme was Listen — or Éist / Słuchać in Irish and Polish. With a fire show featured as one of the main events (a Spleodar first!), we decided to highlight both ideas by combining sound and fire into one bold, dynamic illustration spanning the front and back cover.

The illustration depicts the Spleodar Festival and its many events as burning from within the brochure itself, erupting outward in a dynamic explosion of sound and energy. Because the brochure is a flat, two-dimensional printed piece, the challenge was to introduce movement and create the illusion of animation within a static design. To achieve this, I focused on building a strong sense of depth and kinetic energy through hundreds of individual illustrated layers—each composed of flames, smoke, scorch marks, and burns—carefully stacked to form a living, breathing surface.

The central burn and rip on the cover isn’t arbitrary; it follows the exact shape of the sound wave generated by the word “Spleodar.” What you’re seeing is the sound of the festival tearing its way out from within.