Pete & Fremont and Pete’s Disappearing Act are circus yarns spun by the incomparable Jenny Tripp.  Both stories are narrated by Pete the poodle and seen from the point of view of the animals in Circus Martinez.

To promote these two titles, Jenny and I thought it would be fun to produce a few circus posters on a small scale—circus stickers.   I love old circus posters—who doesn’t?—and kids love stickers. Here’s a sample of some vintage circus posters:

You get the idea.  Since the focus of the stories is on the animals, each poster would feature one of the animal acts.  I worked up some rough thumbnail sketches.

Jenny wrote some better copy to replace the dummy copy shown in the rough sketches.

We were bankrolling the production of these stickers ourselves, so I needed to come up with an inexpensive way to print them.  You can get self-adhesive label stock in 8 1/2 x 11″ sheets.  I fit all the sticker designs into an 8 1/2 x 11″ format, so the printer could print 10 stickers as one piece of art—then guillotine them as individual stickers.  Here’s the layout with tight sketches:

I painted all the stickers as one piece of art (one scan instead of 10 saves bucks) around 125% of the printed size.  I wanted to work a little bit bigger so my lettering would tighten up when it got reduced.  I’m showing you 2 different pieces of the finished art here, because I can’t fit the whole thing onto my Playskool scanner: