Kokoon Arts Club - Part 2

This is what I sketched during a recent excursion to the Kokoon Arts Club exhibit at the Cleveland Public Library which Cathy posted about below. It is a section of the 1926 invitation to the club's annual costume ball. The invitations were printed poster size and then folded and mailed to the recipients. You can see where the guest's name would have been written in by hand.

An invitation to the Bal Masque was highly coveted since it was considered to be the most popular, notorious, party of the year. Each Ball had a theme and party-goers were serious about creating elaborate, and often risque, costumes to represent the theme.




I was primarily interested in capturing the typography and wording on this beautiful art deco poster. The poster can be seen in it's entirety here.

There is an interesting article you can read about the Kokoon Arts Club here.

I used the facing page in my watercolor Moleskine to record the exhibit's description of the poster and to sketch part of the main figure again since I ran out of room on the first sketch.

Before last week I had never even heard of the Kokoon Arts Club. Learning new things about our fair city is one of my favorite parts of sketching.