I’ve been wanting to share the artwork in this following post since I did it late last year… and now I CAN! I was contacted by the Big Cheese over at Creature Skateboards about the possibility of doing a line of decks. Saying YES to that offer was a no-brainer. We then got to work trying to figure out the direction to go with on them. After a little bit of back and forth we settled on something like this… “Hot naked women with skull-faces and horns with big creatures. We shall call them… The Savage Series.”
First I started in on the sketches. These were just for myself as I tossed ideas around in my head. You’ll be able to see some of the sketches which made it to a final idea and some that went in the dump. Everyone seems to love seeing the sketches so here they is…
Next we have the ink illustrations with flat grey-scale values done in photoshop. I did the coloring this way to get the values the way I wanted and so that the simplicity of the coloring would contrast nicely with the detailed illustrations. It also made it a lot easier to keep all of the skin tones, etc. the same across the board. After this stage I sent them off to the Big Cheese so that he could use it to easily tweak the color-scheme to a way that fits Creature, which is green/yellow-scale as is their signature look. I had a lot of fun handing them off to him to see what he brought back.
As you may have noticed… one of those ladies is “covered-up”. As the Big Cheese and I were working on them there was a realization that we might run into some problems with retailers since they were nekkid. So, after I was done with them all I had to go back and draw clothes on all of the nekkid ones. We figured we could package the nude ones with a poly bag and a warning and have the clothed ones out in the open since they would then be nudity-free.
This is a quick-look which he sent back to me after he played with the coloring, background, lettering and so on. I think they will also give you an idea about their packaging to hide the goodies as shown on one of them.
NOW for the good part… where to buy the damn things. You can see all of these boards RIGHT HERE!
Not only that but they crashed my pad and decided to take a little video of me discussing my work on the boards. Waste some more of your company time and go RIGHT HERE!
N8VanDyke 