Project: Research and render various sports venues & arenas to be used as ‘Matte Graphics’ or ‘Etched Glass’ artwork for corporate framing and presentation. The final art had to be vector (line) artwork with minimal texture or shading for single colour reproduction. There were roughly 25 venues chosen by the client to be rendered in this format.
This was another job that required much preparation before putting ‘pencil to paper’. Well, actually ‘putting cursor to pixels’ if I were to be completely accurate, since there were no sketches involved due to a limited budget for each piece. I also had to produce them quite hastily and the final art had to have the ability to be resized to any dimension without any loss of detail.
CorelDRAW is my software of choice when it comes to producing the majority of my vector artwork in a timely fashion and it was perfect for the specific demands of this project. The process for each piece was identical and involved gathering as much visual reference as possible. The internet is a great resource if you key in the right search parameters although official arena or team sites aren’t that helpful, since they usually incorporate very low rez images. The most helpful reference came from fan sites, especially those where the individual has chronicled a road trip with his buddies to their favourite team’s home town. Sometimes I was lucky enough to be supplied with hard copy photos from the client but this was a rare occurrence.
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Once I’d accumulated views from as many angles as possible, supplemented with detail shots, I created a reference layer of montaged photos to present each venue at their most appealing vantage point. The subsequent layers were built up with vector artwork, usually broken down into ‘faces’ or sides with similar qualities and perspective. In architecture, there are usually design elements such as windows or columns that are repeated throughout the structure and vector drawing programs are great at making multiple copies of a specific area within an illustration.
There are a lot of excellent drawing tools in CorelDRAW and I used the perspective effect tool to its fullest advantage, producing views of each arena that are hopefully fresh and rival the typical photographic compositions. The final artwork for each piece was exported as an Adobe Illustrator file and sent for film output. The film properties were determined by the need to either screen print the image onto the matte or etch it into the glass as part of a unique design by Signature Authentics. Their designs incorporate collectible pins and genuine, signed photographic memorabilia.
The 'Glass Art' or 'Etched Glass' series of framed sports images can be seen online and purchased at signatureauthentics.com