The three elements I focused on were Automation, Universal Wages, and Human Connection. These designs depict the growing number of jobs being replaced by automation, the proposed solution of universal wages paid by the government, and a call for people to focus their efforts on areas that cannot be easily automated, such as the humanities, which emphasize human connection.
Tryptic Skate Deck Design: This project was assigned as an exercise in using Adobe Illustrator. I was tasked with designing a triptych depicting three elements of a social issue for a collection of skate decks. Each design was initially drawn in ink, scanned, and then converted to vector linework, colored, and shaded in Illustrator.
Tiger Longboard
This was my first attempt at making stencils with a circuit machine. Unfortunately the project failed as an experiment because the stencil material I used, a clear flexible vinyl, was too difficult to lay on the board at that size. While the registration marks would line up, the rest of the stencil was too flexible and it caused it to fold or lift in places and created blowout on the finer details. My solution was to scrap the original color scheme and use posca paint markers to cover the biggest issues, unfortunately this failed too as the posca was not compatible with the varnish and bled. Overall it was a good experiment and I learned a lot, and I’m still pretty proud of the design.
Kia Skateboard
I wanted to try painting directly on a skate deck so this time I bought a blank one and started from scratch, unlike in the last project where I refurbished a used skateboard. The design is a cartoon version of my cat Kia who is always bringing me birds, and decorating our house with feathers. I started with a rough sketch, then painted on the board with a combination of spray-paint (for the background) and acrylic paints.
