Digital Illustration - Week 03

One of my classes this quarter is digital illustration. Adobe Illustrator is something I should have learned a LONG time ago. Our homework assignment was to design a skate deck. Here's what I came up with.

(click for larger)

I was going for the style of skate decks that were popular in the early and mid '90s. Cartoon graphic images were pretty big on decks back then. I knew a lot of kids in 9th grade that were into skate boarding and I loved looking through their catalogs at the designs by companies like Toy Machine, Bird House, and Alien Workshop. Most of them were just appropriated images from golden age cartoons or other sources. That's actually where Emily the Strange came from by the way. It was a skate deck with an illustration ripped off from a 1970's Nate the Great book and slightly modified. You can see a side by side comparison of the original and Emily here.

Speaking of ripped off designs, I ripped myself off for this one. This is my Beelzkabub screen print design from last September. However, I didn't just use my original, raster illustration that was inked and colored with Photoshop. I completely redrew this as a nice clean vector graphic with Illustrator. The colors are swiped from the cover of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols. It's far from perfect. There's lots of little mistakes, but it was great exercise with the program's pen tool. I'm becoming much more comfortable with it, and Illustrator is quickly becoming one of my favorite tools.