Smack to the Future with Thikicole and Katty WhompAss

Our 4th bout of the season was a salute to the totally tubular '80s.  Always up for some nostalgic fun, many of our league members decided to celebrate in style!  There were ruffled skirts, neon plastic accessories, off-the-shoulder tops, thick waist belts, teased out hair styles and mullets as far as the eyes could see (through "blinds" shades of course).

Despite all of the garishly colorful aspects of the '80s, for some reason I had a hard time pinpointing what sort of imagery to use for the bout poster.  I think the problem was that it just felt like there were too many possibilities (Glam rockers?  Hideous fashions?  Corny TV shows?  The grody lingo?).  After all, the '80s were nothing if not a decade of excess.

This time around I was going to feature 2 skaters as well (#68iou--Thikicole and #412--Katty WhompAss), so I figured that it was probably best to keep the design simple.  I just had to make sure that I stuck with some distinctly '80s design elements.  So of course, I had to use hot pink!  And nothing clashes with hot pink quite as well as lime green. 

From there, the plan was to make the bout flyer resemble a cheesy '80s movie poster.  Because I was drawing 2 skaters, the "back-to-back buddies" pose seemed not only natural, but necessary ;)

Totally having a Corey & Corey moment right now.

Not exactly a fan of Duran Duran either, but Nagel
did the artwork for the album, Rio.

Although I would not call myself a fan of his, I also drew inspiration from artist, Patrick Nagel.  His work is just so dang iconic of the decade.  While Nagel would reduce down or stylize the physical features of his subjects so that they all looked alike, I wanted to make sure that Thiki and Katty both retained their individual appearances (what's the point of drawing real skaters if they look like they can be anyone?).  So, I drew them as I normally would and instead adopted some of his other artistic conventions.  This is primarily evident in color usage.  His subjects were always white-skinned (literally) with very minimal, flat, gray shading and limited color elsewhere in the composition.

Also, they were often topless...but we're not running that sort of an organization here :P

Nagel also made use of simple, often sharp, geometric backgrounds to offset the sensual curves of his subjects.  I used the shapes to frame the skaters instead of placing all those jagged edges behind them, but even so, the geometric shapes are there.

And just as a side note, those little skater silhouettes are from a recruitment poster that I had designed for The Dames about a year ago.

So there you have it--the bout poster for "Smack to the Future," featuring Thikicole and Katty WhompAss! 

Fonts used: Trajan, Forgotten Futurist, Badonk-a-donk, Chronicles of a Hero