My friend Chandler has been working hard to hone his pinstriping talent, and he's been picking up some side work lately. As things have been growing for him, he asked me to develop some imagery for his work. As we discussed it, we quickly decided that some sort of "mascot" would be appropriate, and that would create a memorable mark to give him some recognition.
This is one of the rare times when both the client and I took off running with the first idea. Since pinstriping is very closely associated with hot rods, a 'striping brush doing a burnout was a natural.
This sketch shown is actually the 2nd sketch I did for the character. The first one was scribbled out on some scrap paper while Chandler was laying some stripes on my son's bicycle helmet. I didn't even take the 1st sketch home, as it was simple enough that I had what I needed in my head. This time, I used relatively traditional media for the sketch: Prismacolor pencil and marker paper.
Once I scanned the sketch, I brought it into Adobe Illustrator as a template layer, and laid out the main shapes with Illustrator's Bézier Pen tool and the basic ellipse tool. From there, I went right into Ai CS4's new "Blob Brush" to render pretty much everything besides the basic silhouette.
I felt like the flat color of the Blob Brush would lend itself well to the look of using traditional "1-Shot" enamel like many 'stripers use.
Once the Black & White art was together, I tried out a few type treatments for the t-shirt application. Chandler and I settled on House Industries' House Slant font. Added a couple lines of pinstriping, and we had shirt art.
I promised Chandler a color version as well, so I kept on rockin' the Blob Brush, adding layers of color in-between the layers of detail.
Since this illustration is 100% vector art, Chandler now has a logo that can be enlarged or reduced to nearly any size while maintaining whatever detail the output device or process will allow.
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