Skate Deck Design Pt. 4 - Putting it all together.

So now I had to take all those assets and fit them together within the constraints of the board dimensions.
This took quite a while as I make/finalized a most of the stuff in Photoshop. I pieced together the designs from my previous posts onto my texture canvas.
I opened the deck template in AI and started adjusting the size. I had moved the skate deck outline to the top of the layers so I could see how the design would look on the actual deck. I found that I had some measurement issues even though I copied the measurements onto my canvas in PS. After about 1.5 hours of tweaking, I finally ended up with this:




Then I saved it as a TIFF file, and realized I forgot to incorporate my name somewhere. So at the last minute I opened the TIFF in photoshop and imprinted my name into what was originally the leather bracelet:



After picking up the sticker printout from a printer downtown, I had to VERY CAREFULLY put the sticker on my board, which was sanded and primed. I ended up putting it on a little crooked, which bothered me at first because I'm kind of OCD with things being straight, but when I stoof back I found that the slant worked anyways. Conceptually, glam metal was not something that ever tried to be mainstream 'perfect'.

Final design on the board:



Part 4 Time breakdown:
Tweaking: 1.5 hrs
Name addition: 10 mins
Board sanding and priming: 10mins + 1 hr wait time
Sticker Application and cutting: 20 mins
Total Time: 3 hrs 10 mins


TOTAL PROJECT TIMELINE
Research: 1 hr
Planning: 20 mins
Design Pt. 1 (Steel Crazy): 3 hrs
Design Pt. 2 (Texture, leather bracelet manipulation): 1 hr
Design Pt. 3 (Vector Guitar): 4 hrs
Design Pt. 4: 3 hrs, 10 mins
TOTAL TIME: 12.5 HRS

Skate Deck Design Pt. 3 - Vector guitar

Nothing screams 80s glam metal like Twisted Sister! SO I made a vector image based on one of their actual Les Paul guitars. I then later drew black rings in a design inspired by one of their other guitars. The hot pink/black colour scheme is prominent on the band's album covers and I think it epitomizes one of the many distinct elements of style in the early 80s.


Finished vector guitar



It took about 2 hours to trace the guitar in AI due to all the tiny details and layers involved, as can be seen in the following screens:


Source Images
Trace:

Design reference:



I wanted to add a little something behind it to make it a little more epic so I made a simple glowing ball of light by drawing a circle and adding various blending layers and lighting effects, as well as the plastic wrap filter. Screenshot


FINAL PRODUCT


Total time: 4 hours

DMA 101 - Character Illustration

Definitely THE hardest project I've ever done in the Adobe suite. It took a LONG time (hours and hours) to figure out how best to do everything, and then do it as close to perfect as possible. Missing class didn't help, but I looked up some tips on youtube before I got started.
FINAL PRODUCT:

This is Zoe the Elf Princess. She is a high priestess specializing in elemental magic, particularly earth-based. 

This was based on a drawing inked by gz12wk on deviantart.

My main challenges were primarily detail-oriented, and being a perfectionist this made it very time consuming (several hours over the course of a few days)

all the big pieces in their own separate layers and sublayers, mainly colour/shape based. It got confusing knowing where to start and end each piece esp the wood and leg areas so I just made them transparent and overlapped the lines. (Selection tool, Window<Transparency)

 there were so many little pieces here and it was hard because of the way the lines were drawn, it was hard to see when they started/ended. Next time I definitely want to work with a sketch that has more definite lines.

The braids were kind of a pain, I did it piece by piece on the same layer. It wasn't so much difficult as time-consuming (45min) to get everything right and forego a couple of the pixelated lines so it would look cleaner.

settled with a curved line here, a mod from the original sketch which was a straight line that was thicker at the top

DMA 101 - Sports Logo

I chose to do the Mighty Ducks because it wasn't too simple but didn't look overwhelmingly complex either.

Progress Screens
Screen 1: First thing I decided to do was make a silohoutte layer in black tracing the outer shape in black then adding a fill so that I could add the internal shapes on top of it and end up with the correct stroke size that matches the original logo. I had a bit of trouble with the beak part, circular part on the left. It was a pain to manipulate the curve to get it close enough.

Screen 2: After tracing the outermost outline of the logo silohoutte, I needed to figure out a way to draw the inner white border. So I took the visibility off the silohoutte layer so that I could see the reference layer and traced the white border, then filled the triangle with white so that when I turned the visibility of the black silohoutte back on, only the black border would be visible.

Screen 3: Farther along the project, before I could do the yellow sticks I had to deal with their black borders. I had to do the black rectangular shapes not only for the top but for the bottom as well, because in the reference image and as seen on the final below, there's a bit of black that cuts off the white border on the bottom parts of both sticks. I made one shape and duplicated it 3 times and tweaked them to fit.

Final Product: