In this project I was tasked with designing and creating two skateboards that represented thee theme of "contrast". Below are my first round of sketches, done in Adobe Fresco, as you can see I really leaned into the concept of two animals or characters as well as elements.

After critiques, I completed my second round of sketches and by the end I knew my design.

The last two sketches solidified what I thought would be my final design, but as I began drawing I realized it would be incredibly difficult to have the two characters overlap and chose to simplify the design and have one character on each board. Eventually I created my final designs and was ready to print.

I had two boards for this project, one normal and one black. The design on the left would be going on the regular board while the one on the riht would be on the black board. I liked this idea because each have an underlying theme of contrasting elements (air and water respectively) as well as being almost stark opposites of each other. So once I finished the designs, I prepared them for the Cricut cutter. I used vinyl for the characters and airbrushed it.

Below is my process for the seamonster, who I affectionately named Nessie after the Lockness Monster. She took me a reasonable amount of time, I started with the body and then cut out another piece of vinyl for the details. And finally, I removed all of the vinyl and airbrushed over the details to give them a glow-effect. 

In the fourth photo, it can be seen that especially around her eyes and face there are parts where the vinyl peeled the paint off. To fix this I just went over it with a little bit of acrylic paint (5th photo).

Meanwhile, I worked on the other design, whom I named Mothman because thats what I based his design off of. I didnt have as long of a process because Mothman was more simplistic, and I ran into less problems. I started with the body and forest, and once that had dried I put on the vinyl piece for the eyes and antennae. Lastly, when I had finished the glow on Nessie I added some to Mothman's eyes, thats also when I airbrushes 

Here are the finished products side-by-side.