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.
![](http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0879/7646/files/little_annie_fannie_medium.jpg?v=1582236382)
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:
![](http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0879/7646/files/separate_elements_copy_grande.jpg?v=1582236507)
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.
![](http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0879/7646/files/assemled_sketch_grande.jpg?v=1582236538)
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.
![](http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0879/7646/files/outline_grande.jpg?v=1582236602)
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.
![](http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0879/7646/files/color_1_thru_4_grande.jpg?v=1582236660)