My Japanese Style Skate Deck

One of the two final assignments for my “Sketching for Communications” course at Seneca College was to design a skate deck.  I am a huge fan of manga and that inspired me to create some Japanese style design.

When I thought of Japan, what popped out in my mind was Japanese girl, kimono, sakura (cherry blossom), and pagoda, and those were all elements I decided to use in my design.  I started looking for images of girls in kimono, sakura, and pagoda as my resources before I started drawing sketches and trace my sketches.

Here are my sketches and an image of pagoda that I traced:
(Click on the thumbnails to enlarge)

The “Pond70″ logo was given by the professor to be used for our skate deck.

Once we finished designing the skate deck, we needed to find a print shop that can print our design in a transparent sticker paper.  It was not that easy since not many print shops have sticker paper in that huge size.  The next thing to do was to find a blank skate board deck where we could stick our sticker on.  Oh, before we could stick our transparent sticker, we had to paint the skate deck white so our design can be seen clearly.

We did this in April 2008, it was winter, and it was COLD!  I just arrived in Canada 4 months earlier, I am originally from a hot country with no winter.  It was painful when we had to go out to paint our skate deck and waited until it dried.  I was so relieved when we could get back inside again to start the sticking sticker process.

My classmates were great, some of them helped me with the painting, cutting and sticking process.  And it’s how it’s suppose to be done, I think.  It would be hard to do everything yourself.  You just have to help each other.  For example, sticking that huge sticker yourself wouldn’t be easy.  On the other hand, when some people help you holding some parts of the stickers and stuff, it became easy.

Here are pictures of me while cutting the sticker and after my skate deck is ready:
(click on thumbnails to enlarge images)