The posters for the 2026 Pencil Fest immediately catch the eye with their vibrant, handcrafted energy. They were created by hand, not digitally—you can feel the texture of the paper, the roughness of the lines, and the rich textures found in real pencils, wax crayons, and sometimes gouache and felt-tip pens. The posters seem to be imbued with the scent of a workshop, where everything crunches, stains your fingers, and breathes true creativity.

The text on the posters isn’t written in a neat font, but rather appears hastily scrawled in a child’s hand, with varying slants and letter sizes. The festival’s name—”Karandash-Fest”—jumps and flips, as if participating in the carnival’s hilarious revelry. Sometimes the date or location is written on scraps of paper pasted over the main image, as if they were notes or hints for the performer backstage.

The main character, a pencil clown, appears here not as a familiar figure with a banal smile and round nose, but as an elusive, multifaceted symbol of fantasy and freedom. His image sometimes dissolves into splashes of color, sometimes coalesces from incongruous details: in one place, his nose becomes a bright red pencil; in another, where his eyes should be, there are round blobs, each larger than the other; his cone-shaped hat resembles a sharpened pencil lead, and the stripes on his costume flow beyond the edges of the poster, like the traces of a child’s hasty scribbles.

The posters’ compositions are devoid of any formality: the lines dance and falter, as if the artist were either in a hurry or pensively lingering on the paper. The entire space exudes a sense of circus-like chaos—paper flags, confetti, and chaotic arrows fly about here and there, as if the viewer were at a circus rehearsal or inside a painted tent. The colors boldly contrast and shimmer—a rich fuchsia suddenly juxtaposes with an acid green, and a bright yellow bursts through stripes of apricot and turquoise. Sometimes, inexpressive yet emotional stains are scattered across the poster, like the marks left by smeared pencil marks.