The importance of the sketch book, an illustrated Artifact history
Hey out there in internet land. I’ll start this here post with an apology for my legions of blog reading fans out there. I was pretty boring last week, and thats why i didn’t post up and goodies. It also had something to do with the aftermath of this.
Once the fog cleared, I started flipping through the pile of old sketchbooks i’ve filled over the past 4+ years here at Rome. There are close to 8 of them. These arent you ‘oh look at me i’m so artsy‘ type of sketchbooks. No, these are just some plain old spiral bound books, 8.5×11 sized with some good heavyweight paper. Utilitarian.
Anyway, I’m the one responsible for the look of the Artifact graphics over the years. The first year was done as a freelance job with my friend and sometime collaborator Sean Carmody. That was for the 05 season, and it was done as full size collages, using all the resources our full time and freelance design studios had to offer after hours. I’m pretty stoked to still have this art sitting in my house – it was the first board graphic I ever worked on, and it laid the ground work for bigger things to come.
After that, i came on to work full time here at Rome, and have done every Artifact since. Here are some scans from my catalog of sketchbooks on the early stages of each of the years board art.
05/06 Season. These sketches laid the groundwork for the infamous Shocker graphic, and the birth of the Really Inappropriate LE graphic.
06/07 Season. The ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ theme started with this single page sketch, and evolved itself into snowboards you rode around on. Crazy.
07/08 Season. This slightly inappropriate sketch became the ‘Hustlin’ series of Artifacts. Although a bit too much for the general public, this original idea was reborn on the Limited Shop Kid graphic.
08/09 Season. In stores, and on magazine covers now, the ‘Live Nude Girls’ graphic is one of my favorites. For those of you that work in a shop, there will be another Limited Shop Kid version of this as well. Good luck getting your hands on one of those!
09/10 Season. I cant give away much, but i can say that the future of the Artifact is VIOLENT!
The moral of this story is this: Keep those sketch books filling kids. You computer is just a tool, just like your pen. Just because you have illustrator on your computer, it doesn’t make you a designer. Do your homework – the more you research, sketch, rework, research more and start over, the better your final product will be.