I'm very stoked about how The Eternal Skate Park graphic turned out, and thought people might enjoy reading about it's inspiration and creation. Early on, I always admired the work of artists that did highly detailed and complex one-pane cartoon drawings for Mad Magazine and the like. Here is a fine example by the great Will Eisner for Playboy Magazine.
I wanted to create a drawing in that tradition, and set out to do that with this graphic. I wanted to portray in a single scene the heavenly heights and hellish lows of skating. To create such a complicated scene, I start with a very rough doodle of the overall layout. So rough in fact that I don't think anyone looking at it could make sense of it, but I can. I never save those sketches. Using that sketch as a guide, I draw all the elements that will go into the graphic separately, and scan them into the computer. Here are some of them:
Once all the elements are drawn and scanned, I manipulate them in Photoshop until the overall composition is working. In this pic you can see that I have started inking in some of the elements.
Here is the finished inked line drawing. You can see that I decided to move the Eater Island stone guy over to the far right, which allowed me to make the angle carrying the Wave Warrior a bit bigger. The next step is to color it all in and prepare the art for screen printing.
One thing that's kind of funny is that there are four Wave Warrior characters in the design when there are only ever supposed to be three. I didn't catch this until the art was completed. Whoops.
