Adobe - Skate Jam, Tony Hawk Competition

This was a design contest focused towards illustrators and graphic designers, to design an in game skateboard for Tony Hawks new mobile game. Were the winner would get a year subscription to the adobe cloud and a mac book pro.
The only limitations of the brief was that it had to be constructed within any adobe product.

Now I do not know when this design contest was announced but I only got notified of it a day and a half before the deadline, and due to being caught up on another brief I didn't have a load of time to dedicate to this contest. So admittedly I could of thought out this contest a lot better, almost going at it like and actual brief, but due to the time restrains I decided to just have a bit of fun with the contest, using it as a break from my other project.

Now my goal for this, besides having fun with it, was to test how colour and inking looks without smudging the ink like I have been lately. While also following tips I had taken from the Gumroad tutorial of Dave Rapoza that I had recently watched.

​Now these sketches are all over the place and with no reference as I was having fun, but after inking up the skull in the top left corner I ran into the issue of having too much empty space on the board, so I decided to play around with adding a body incorporating the other hand sketch idea I had came up with. This made it look like a punk playing card which i was happy with.

Then came the issue of choosing the right colours for it, did I want to stick to my pastel colours I had been playing around with and testing recently or did I want to go all out "pop punk" style and explode colour into peoples eyes? 

After incredibly fast feedback from other illustrators (since you know, no spare time), they stated that the vibrant colours worked incredibly well as a skateboard but the almost pastel one in the top left didn't work. Most agreeing that the yellow and purple ones jumped out the most.

And this is the final image that was submitted to the contest, showing off a terribly rushed mock up of the skateboard and a. close up to show off the textures and detail in the ink and colouring. 

For the colouring side of it I decided to switch it from purple to pink as for me that seemed better and then applied to Dave Rapoza's lighting technique to the shadows to make it look almost neon like. which worked well for the bones and the eyes, but the iris of the eyes didn't come out that well.

Now looking back on it I can say that this has too much texture for a skateboard being designed for a mobile phone game, but as an actual skateboard it would work.

When the contest is over I will link the winners here.