Following on from that cliff-hanger of a teaser post the other week, here's my contribution to the Pointe Blank project; creating a poster for Birmingham Royal Ballet's Hobson's Choice.

For last year's Coppélia I spent quite a lot of time on illustration and layering and, though I wanted to do something similar this year, I didn't have quite as much time to spend on it, so needed to keep things simple.

To that end, a repeating pattern of the same ladies' Victorian-style boot made for a good start. I placed this pattern over a leathery-looking background – another little nod to the shoe-making trade – using a transparency and a kind of golden glow. (No special reason for the glow; it just looks nice.)

Another element I wanted to include was a zero – that being the precise number of choices Hobson's presented with in the production. I tried a few different ways of incorporating this but in the end, the simplest way was to replace all the incidents of the letter 'O' with the number '0'. B00m!

As Hobson's Choice is a comedy, I thought it was appropriate to use slightly cheeky copywriting, so composed the tagline "A thoroughly amusing allegory of Victorian cobblers." C'mon - it is about Victorian cobblers!

The final thing I was adamant I'd feature somewhere or other were the pink rodents Henry Hobson hallucinates following a particularly heavy night out. Oh, yes siree, they're in there somewhere. Spot 'em if you can.

That's enough about what I did. You should totally go and have a look at the 26 other designs which were unveiled last night. Just as with Coppélia, there's a huge range of styles, concepts and takes on the subject; it's everso impressive and I'm very pleased to be part of it: www.pointeblank.co.uk

You can find out more about BRB's production of Hobson's Choice, which starts tomorrow, over on their website.