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

Skate Deck - theme acquired

Started my research for the skate deck design, decided to go with a glam-metal inspired theme, incorporating popular elements that I've seen on album covers, instruments, and fashion.

I've typed out a basic idea of what I want to do:
Background: 3D metal design, with space effects
Main object: vector guitar inspired by Twisted Sister
Secondary Objects: Leather band diagonally across the bottom, assets from photos of old synths, lightning
Font(s): Robo font
Text: TBD

I started a folder of reference images on my photobucket account

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: