I just re-found this photo, (I think) from 1998:

…Team Babar was my old skate crew. Still is:

Down for life!

…with musical accompaniment by the Poo Poodles covering the song “Salvation” as done by Rancid. Enjoy!

Life’s been busy, hectic, and great. Here’s to a fantastic 2010! Below is my first skate pic (taken by the extremely talented skater/photo journalist Gregory Tracy). My only resolution is to keep the fire burning… I turn 35 this month so I’ll be trying to double up on everything, from geeking to skateboarding. If you’re reading this, best wishes for you and yours.

Illustrator, on a canvas of 33″ by 9.5″. Four color print on a white-dipped board:

In the footwear world, the Nike Dunks probably outrank everyone when it comes to special edition shoes and an eager market of skaters and shoe-fanciers to buy them.
I had this idea that I knew would work: create a hurricane-related shoe (post Katrina and Rita), and send money to the state or the Red Cross or something like that. As it turns out, you have to have a lawyer just to give Nike a peek at your design. Either that or know a Nike rep.

Stock Photo:

Skate Shop Ad:

This was part of a series of ads we did that were decidedly against our “competition” as it were… a shop called “Go Big” owned by a guy named Gary. Go Big no longer exists, but the ads are still funny. Here’s another old one:

This was a pretty normal half-page ad in a coupon book… one thing I was especially happy about was the Latin text Photoshopped onto the right door… “vado magnus combibo” roughly translates to “Go Big Sucks.”

I know silkscreening is the ultimate craft, and I know three and four color prints are awesome, but there is something gratifying about dealing with heat transfers coming from a digital press… unlimited color, gradients galore, and you can shade as much as you want to, however you want to.
This was a graphic that became Wayne Patrick’s pro model for Aminal Skateboards (intentional misspelling, by the way), a company based out of New Orleans and owned by my friend Shawn Fleming.

The artwork itself was done by Wayne’s friend Wil, my task was to take the drawing, make it print-friendly, and color it… with one complication… I had to maintain the original line work (whereas I’d normally redraw the lines clean). I was also asked to remove the “Friends Forever” text and replace it with the brand name. The turnaround time was quick, but I thought it came out pretty neat:

I’m a friend and fan of a skateboard company called Deluxe Distribution, and often times in the past I’d send over random graphics to my friends Jim and Mic E. These are a few shots of me playing around with one of the brands that Deluxe has under it… Real Skateboards. These didn’t make the cut, but I like to think of this as a high-tech and adult way of scribbling your favorite skate brand’s name on the back of a notebook or on your griptape. Just showing love:

This was originally done for a shop I no longer have any affiliation with, but it was never fully completed, and it has one minor bug that you may find if you play with it long enough:

It’s still fresh after Halloween so I figured I’d share this… I went through a phase a while back where I was really having fun drawing zombies… mine, though gory by some standards, are probably a bit too cartoony for anyone’s use but my own.

It just so happened that the skateboard company I was riding for at the time wanted to do some zombie graphics, so I pulled out my sketchbook and cleaned them up. The deck never happened, but I still dig having them.

Sketches:

Zombies cleaned up via the drawing tools in Adobe Flash and Adobe Illustrator, using a Wacom Graphire pen pad: