Paul Lukes is a Fort Collins-based multimedia graphic designer and artist whose most recent work with creative agency Bonfire Effect has been featured as the promotional material for the local music festival FoCoMX.
“I’m a multidisciplinary artist,” Lukes said. “I do everything. For my day job, I’m a graphic designer slash creative director type. I do everything from logos to ad campaigns, and FoCoMX in particular was a full campaign branding, coming up with the theme and everything.”
Lukes’ creative work spans across mediums and uses, including marketing materials, graphic design and fine art pieces.
“My husband is insanely talented, and it’s been a pleasure to watch how much he’s grown over the past 16 years,” said Kyle Eustice, Lukes’ wife and creative collaborator. “Getting the FoCoMX job was such a big thing for him because he’s going to be seen everywhere. He got to do a mural on a window downtown and just really kind of flex his art skills in so many different ways. I saw how hard he worked on it.”
Lukes’ work on the FoCoMX graphics began with a variety of concepts that were eventually narrowed down to the current designs, which embody FoCoMX and the local music scene.
“We kind of got to the root of it, being the idea of making your own musical wish,” Lukes said. “You’ve got any type of music you could think of, and you can find anything that suits your taste or your flavor. The word apothecary and a kind of fortune teller theme came to mind, and so we started to kind of spin out that idea.”
Once they determined an artistic angle, Lukes and his collaborators created the current designs, which are made to be flexible so they can be featured on different types of promotional materials.
“We ended up on this, this kind of psychedelic ’70s-looking frame with a central image of fortune teller hands with lightning bolts coming out of the lips and the hands,” Lukes said. “It’s kind of like the hands are granting you your musical wish. The mouth and the lightning bolts are all kind of supposed to symbolize music in this weird psychedelic way, and trying to do it in a retro style.”
The designs are full of nods to both Fort Collins and the festival itself while still focusing on the theme that had been developed for the artwork.
“I illustrated the whole thing myself from scratch,” Lukes said. “Each little square kind of represents something that ties into FoCoMX. If you look around the edge of the poster, there’s the FoCoMX logo, which is the little guitar pick. Then you’ve got Horsetooth and you’ve got other stuff that ties into that kind of apothecary concept, whether it’s dice or a magic serum bottle or a crystal ball.”
Lukes said building out the visual theme of FoCoMX had a deeper significance that included connecting with the audience.
“When they look at the poster, I want them to see that it’s about Fort Collins, about local music, about building community and about not only finding your own taste in music, but maybe also finding your own voice,” Lukes said.
This goal of bringing the community together through creative work is at the core of Lukes’ career.
“I’m super passionate about community and using art and creativity as a way to bring people together,” Lukes said. “So I think FoCoMX is right up my alley. Also, the Bonfire Effect is very much all about community, and it very much aligns with our core values as a company.”
Lukes also founded a design collective called CoLab, which has created a community for local designers and other creatives, Eustice said.
“He takes that initiative on himself,” Eustice said. “He’s genuinely passionate about design. He loves bringing people together.”
This focus on the community began early on for Lukes. As an artist who has been creating since childhood, Lukes cited a range of creative influence, including the communities he was immersed in early on as he split his youth between California and New Mexico.
“I had a very diverse upbringing, and I think it influenced my creativity a bit,” Lukes said. “So I have the skate subculture from California. It’s like punk rock and hip hop. But then I also have a lot of Southwestern flavor kind of subversively brought into my work from living in New Mexico and growing up around Chicano culture, like lowriders and the churches and Catholicism and all that stuff kind of comes into my art in weird, kind of indirect ways.”
These different influences have also impacted the evolution of his art in conjunction with the different physical mediums he uses.
“(My art) has kind of evolved into being a graphic designer, an illustrator and a fine artist,” Lukes said. “I can do design; I can paint. There’s multiple ways to voice the art or voice the creativity or the message. I think graphic design for me has just become one avenue.”
No matter what creative work Lukes is dedicated to at any given time, art is a key piece of Lukes’s life.
“This is what I’m meant to do on the Earth, I think,” Lukes said. “I’m grateful that I actually get to make money doing it.”
Reach Gracie Douglas at entertainment@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.
