OUGD 503 - Individual practice - Boardpusher competition #3

The boardpusher contest this month was to design a skateboard deck under the theme of tattoos, this was a perfect topic for me as it ties in with my practical element of my COP module. For this brief I firsts started to look at the tattoo designs that I had been studying for COP, this was Russian criminal tattoo design. For this style there are some good sources to work from especially if your analysing the illustration styles.

There are three books documenting Russian criminal tattoos that contain images and illustrations taken from actual prisoners in Russian camps or gulags. For this competition I intend to create a sleeve style illustration built up of lots of little images rather than one big one.

I wanted the images to be of recognisable things rather than just random tattoo style images. I had to think of what I wanted to base my tattoos on because getting a tattoo is a personal thing so for the board design I though it couldn't be personal in the sense of just me but it could include things that influenced me or I remember growing up. I thought about using famous skateboarders as a basis for the portraits in my tattoos but I felt this might be too obvious for a deck design and that fact that most people would recognise them.

From doing some further research I came across tattoos based on pop culture like for example there was a darthvader day of the dead tattoo which I based one of mine on. I though popular culture would be an ideal theme to follow for an old school tattoo style as there was lots of scope in the characters you could use.

I started looking into pop culture figures or icons and wrote down a list of all the elements I could include in my tattoo designs.

pop culture -
star wars
superman
batman
cat woman
wonder woman
mickey mouse
toy story
the simpsons
super mario
spiderman

I found an article which gave me inspirations on this topic from someone who had a really simple idea of using old currency and drawing faces over the existing coins in relation to pop culture icons, I think they work really well.

I grew up around a lot of these things and so feel they have a personal connection to plus millions of people my age and older.

I felt the Russian criminal tattoo style was too much of a specific, relatively unknown style that people wouldn't really be able to relate back to so I started looking at vintage and old american tattoos.

I based a lot of my final designs around the basic structure of the tattoos I had seen, replacing the faces with pop culture icons to make them fit with the style I was going for. I found a website that displayed a lot of the old tattoo examples you might find in a tattoo parlour so I could get some real authenticity to the illustrations.

Vintage tattoos

I started drawing some designs out to scan in, some worked better than others but I feel as a whole they worked well in this style.

After I put them through illustrator and cleaned them up a bit I could really see them start to look more like tattoo designs.

As part of the development I wanted to see which worked well in colour, personally im not a big fan of colour tattoos anyway especially when they're in an old school style. I think some worked better than others but on the whole I felt they looked a lot more visually pleasing in just line drawings.

I repositioned them into the shape of the template board, I positioned them to look like they might be a sleeve of a series of tattoos on someone and I feel after a few attempts I got the balance right, I left some out so that the space didnt get too crowded.

I submitted the final design on a non painted natural board to add the idea they were a vintage style, I think the illustrations stood out more on a white background but they fitted better on the natural board