Poster Girl.

AGE 28

COMES FROM Knoxville, Tennessee

LIVES IN Salt Lake City, Utah

URL leiabell.com

Leia Bell wasn't trying to be an indie-rockband poster artist--she got recruited. She was living in an apartment in a snug little alley in Salt Lake City, in a neighborhood where warehouses and auto body shops are giving way to artist studios, doggie day cares, and a rock club called Kilby Court. It was Phil Sherburne, the club's owner (and her boyfriend), who talked Bell into using her new printmaking degree to advertise his venue's shows. Bell wanted her hand-drawn handbills to stand out among the ads stapled to utility posts, so when a friend unexpectedly gave her some silk-screen frames, she gathered latex paint "mis-tints" from hardware stores, claimed a corner of Sherburne's nearby woodshop, and started screening.

Bell's posters never depict the band she's advertising: "I'm not hip, so I wouldn't know where to begin," she says. She bases her cleanly drawn images on random photos of people that she's been taking for years. "I see every photo as a drawing," she says. "I draw only people, animals, and inanimate objects. I've had the same style since I was 12 years old." The designer takes inspiration from another artist who also designed posters for underground entertainers and rendered them in saturated colors and bold, flat shapes: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Bell's posters often include members of her target audience, and her subjects often wear blank expressions as they engage in such productive activities as inspecting one another's tongues or flipping one another off. The wry illustrations match the sounds of Built to Spill, the Dirtbombs, and My Chemical Romance. But her posters don't last--every time she puts one up, it gets snatched.

About a year after she started making prints, a client hired her to create snowboard designs and introduced her to gigposters.com, awakening her to the broader rockposter market. In 2003, Bell attended the Flatstock convention in Austin, Texas, where one collector snapped up all 400 of her prints, and another offered her a contract to buy a number of each poster she creates. Today, Bell designs for venues in Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and Nottingham and Manchester, England, for such big-name acts as Elvis Costello, Sonic Youth, Moby, and Weezer (whose guitarist is her brother Brian). Several of her posters were included in Chronicle Books' 2004 The Art of Modern Rock: The Poster Explosion and were cited in Newsweek and on National Public Radio.

Bell's work continues to grow organically along with her environment. She and Sherburne now have two sons, and their outings to places like Utah's Hogle Zoo inspire some of the more unlikely images for her posters. "If I didn't live here at the music venue, my art would be different--I can hear it from my living room. The band members wander over for a Band-Aid, or a beer," Bell says. "My art is very personal to me. I can't fake anything."

PHOTO (COLOR): All design and illustration is by Leia Bell. Right: Poster for Metro, Chicago, 2005.

PHOTO (COLOR): Right: Poster for Kingsbury Hall, Salt Lake City, 2005.

PHOTO (COLOR): Below: Poster for Kilby Court, Salt Lake City, 2005.

PHOTO (COLOR): Below, right: Poster for Olpin Union Ballroom, Salt Lake City, 2005.

PHOTO (COLOR): Left: Personal print.

PHOTO (COLOR): Top right: Poster for Kilby Court, 2005.

PHOTO (COLOR): Top left: Poster for Kingsbury Hall, 2004.

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By Kim Hancey Duffy