Skateboard Work and Completion!

The inspiration for my skateboard design idea came to me while I was sitting in my hot tub. It was a cold night, with a very clear sky. I didn't even know where to start for an idea, other than the fact that it had to be 'Predator' themed. Even though it was a clear night, there were some passing clouds. the mixture of the heat from the hot tub, the steam rising from the hot tub, and the head of a lion I envisioned in the clouds all came together to conclude as my skateboard design. It was very hard the next day to put what was in my head onto paper, but after a few rough sketches, the idea took a physical form.



Once it was on paper, I began to implement it into Illustrator.

The style I was going for was the sort of 'child-like' styles on some boards in skate shops, and came up with a simple first draft. I left the lion head out as the final and most important part. To implement a texture that we had to make, I took a picture of ceiling stucco, and used that for the texture of the moon. The texture for the volcano was from Illustrator. I finished and refined pretty much the whole board until it was time for the lion head.

I had a tough time coming up for a design for the mane, and also had to reference Google images of lions to come up with a face idea.



I used many tools such as warp, crystallize, wrinkle, and twirl.



By mistake, in adding a radial blur and making a compound path I came up with an interesting alternative

But decided to stick with my original and mounted that to my board.