Decks For Change- Live Brief

Decks for Change is a skateboard deck design competition aimed at creating awareness of important issues to inspire positive change in the world and give well-deserved exposure to local artists, illustrators and graphic designers.

www.decksforchange.com/

So I have come across this brief asking for designs that address issues that affect us that can be turned into the graphic/illustration for the artwork on a skateboard deck. I have decided to target mental health in particular male mental health as I feel that most of us men/blokes shy away from talking about our mental health which in turn can lead to later problems. I my self suffer from poor mental health now and then  and have a few issues that I never dealt in my early adult life which in the end crept up on me and gave me a real hard time. If in the first place i knew that many people on this tiny planet suffer from a bad state of mental helth at some point in our lives i would not of been ashamed to admit it and could of got help alot sooner. The most amazing thing I found through this is the power of talking, at first it was the usual just get put on pills and deal with it but after once again been hit with a groggy mind I decided to give counselling ago and what a shock that was by just talking things through with someone it started to help. This showed me the power of talking and how it can help.

To help me keep my roughs all the same size and same area for me to work in i made myself a little template of the deck shape.

Here i have mocked up some quick design ideas i had, i decided seen as its mental helth i'm going to try address then by using a image of the brain this would best represent the mind.  These have been done in acrylics so i could stat off using colour from the off as i feel a very colourful graphic will be more of a eye catcher and after years looking at skateboard art work colour is always better the black and white.

I feel that from these roughs i'm going to have to develop the ideas a bit further to see which i can refine and get the message across a it easier. To develop them im going to make a bigger template so my designs can have more detail added. 

So I Have taken the Brain idea with the mouths coming out of it as i feel this has some very good visual qualities to play with and its eye catching as you want to know what the hell its is. Agin I made a template this time much larger so i would have more area to experiment with. I hagain used pencil then pen then Acrylic paint 

Again just some development work on this design. Done on the larger template using acrylics and on the new design it have put the black background on in photoshop this made the design pop off the board more.

 

Had a play around in Photoshop to see what could be done to help with adding the shading, by doing it on here i can see what it will look like before painting the image agin. Also by selecting each colour i can swap and change to see if any other scheme could work. By just using the opacity on the brush i quickly added some black to see if i could build up the depth, it works but i need to play around with the settings more to better apply the quality im looking for. 

Jimbo Phillips Graphics

I have looked at Jim's designs from a young age as I got into skateboarding when i was around 8 and since then skateboard graphics have played a big part in my love for art.  As his work and his style was everywhere in that scene. Using spot illustration as the main element in the design i feel this is where my uncontrollable use of this is nearly all my work as i have loked at more board graphics then any other style of illustration. The use of black outlines i feel too comes back to this as again in many board designs they have nice clean line work to help highline the image, this with the use of heavy colour in most instances.