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!

mrsjjfive

One of the greatest things that has come out of being a part of the Aid to Injured Riders nonprofit has been the friendships I've developed with the other girls involved. I am proud to call them my friends and work on personal projects with them as well. Jodi Johnson has been a rock star behind the camera this season snapping some really awesome candids of racers and their teams. Because she was snapping more and more photos, she came to me wanting a logo for "mrsjjfive". I was happy to take on the project and sketched up some hand drawn logos one evening. After only one round of revisions we landed on one that she could use to make stickers, use it on autograph cards and, most importantly, as a watermark on her images she shares. Below are the various sketches that had been turned to vector and the final logo Jodi chose. 

 Above are the initial unorganized logo sketches on paper. Most times I sketch first to brainstorm various ideas.

 Above are those initial sketches in vector form. These are fairly rough vectors and I later cleaned up the line work on them. These are what I presented to Jodi for round one.

 The logos shown above are round two based on Jodi's feedback from round one. She wanted to incorporate some dots within the one logo so I provided various options to choose from.

Eventually she settled on the above logo that I had cleaned up, yet still allowed for the handwritten feel to remain. I look forward to seeing it around the flat track community!

Dan Bromley Loses His "A"

Today at the AMA Pro Flat Track Arizona Mile, Throttle Down Speed Co. rider Dan Bromley made the GNC1 main event. This is a huge accomplishment for any rookie rider and it means next year Bromley will no longer have a letter on his number plate. Not only did Bromley make the main event early in the season, but he finished the race 11th out of 18, which is also an impressive statistic. I couldn't be more proud of Dan Bromley for representing TDSC in quality fashion. Below is a photo taken by mrsjjfive (Jodi Johnson).

Logistically speaking, now that Dan Bromley will be rocking a new number without his "A", I will have to revise his logo that has the 54A incorporated. It was definitely something I had recognized would eventually become out of date, in fact I hoped for it. I'm positive I can handle the revision, well worth it! Much congratulations to Bromley on losing that "A".