You can check out Chris Bigalke’s Showdeer Collection HERE on OpenSea!
Showdeer is the moniker for the digital graphic collage design and illustrative artwork of artist Chris Bigalke. He has been drawing for as long as he can remember and started experimenting with digital design with MS Paint in the mid 90s in Costa Mesa/Newport Beach, CA and then Photoshop on a Power Mac G4 at the age of 26 in 2006 in Santa Barbara, CA. A few years later he bought a Macbook and started designing digitally consistently.
While heavily involved in the party and music scene of Portland, Oregon in the late 2000s, he booked bands at a small club and started designing posters for the shows even though there was no budget to design them. After designing about 200+ crude posters on the house he got better and his style evolved into a sort of retro-psychedelic and surreal collage style using found vintage imagery combined with a gritty pastel color palette. This unique style and vibe of art is both a blend of his reminiscent youth playing on the beaches of Southern California as well as exploring the forests of Oregon which ultimately became his signature and recognizable style in the Pacific Northwest music scene.
Soon after, local bands were asking him to design posters for their shows at other venues in Portland, Seattle and beyond and not too long after he was able to quit his regular day job of booking bands in 2013 to become a full-time freelance artist.
After designing and drawing hundreds of posters for local bands as well as national acts like Wilco, Guided By Voices and Built To Spill, working with corporate clients including Red Bull, Pabst, Lagunitas and Universal, he also started painting large-scale murals and designing beer labels for local breweries.
Now with covid having an impact on gig posters his main focus is painting fine art pieces in studio for collectors and galleries but also having fun illustrating on Procreate for iPad Pro and diving into the NFT scene.
