Women Who Ride

I've had this vision in my head of a sticker design to represent women riders. The original photograph came from mrsjjfive's collection, a photo of flat tracker Morgan Monroe. With Morgan joining the Throttle Down Speed Co. team, the image would fit perfectly to not only represent her, but also women riders in general. 

The other evening I attempted to sketch the vision that I've carried for a few weeks, maybe even a couple months now. I took pencil to Rives BFK, took a photo of the sketch, tossed it in Illustrator and vectorize it. The graphite on the textured paper just didn't translate when I did a quick Illustrator image trace, and I was quite unsatisfied with the image. Tonight I took a second attempt-this time micron on Rives. I did most of it in a 02 micron, added detail with a 005 and then filled in the larger areas with a thick Sharpie. Already I was liking the overall image.

From there I tossed the image into Photoshop, added a Black & White filter as well as a Curves layer to make the black and white very prominent and to minimize the middle gray tones. I saved that out and tossed it into Illustrator to do a quick image trace. Since it was hand drawn the line work from the image trace was naturally imperfect. While I like the hand drawn look, I wanted to smooth out some of the line work to make the overall image more clear. Smoothing out the lines would also benefit future vinyl cuts.

To complete the image I added a black background and a thick white stroke around the entire graphic to make the woman rider really pop. Below is the transition from ink on paper to the final vector art. Stay tuned to see future applications and potential sticker and vinyl prints!