One of the funnest designs I’ve been tasked to do was this flyer for a local bar’s Green Bay Packers vs Chicago bears game (Sept. 25th, 2011). I thought it would be cool to have two skulls facing off (no pun intended). I started sketching from a reference photo.

Reference photo upon lightbox

Stylized skull sketch

Initially I wasn’t very happy with the sketch. Something seemed off, especially around the cheekbone area. I kept it, but started over a few times to no avail. A friend suggested to just remove some of the detail around the problem area, which helped a lot. I scanned the sketch, and went to work in Adobe Illustrator.

Plotting a basic path for vectors

I start by in a way, connecting dots. You place one point, then another and it automatically connects the line. I start out rough, and can then curve and fine tune them as needed.

The vector path in progress

Several hours later, the skull design vectors were complete, and a huge relief!

Vector outlines

Eventually, I moved on to the helmet. Originally I wanted to use a modern NFL helmet, but found it obscured too much of the cool skull design. So I opted for the pre-1950s leather helmets.

Leather helmet

The stitching detail was also a path (line), set to dashed with a particular gap between. A duplicate was made and changed to a transparent white to give a little more depth.

Stitching detail

Below you can see some of the layers in the Photoshop document that were used. Going clockwise, the starburst effect was achieved with a basic star shape and blurred. This was placed atop a splatter texture I changed to yellow. Next (top right), a little more splatter, then I continued on with the other elements like the type. In the bottom right portion, you can see how textures were used to give the design more depth.

Various elements put together

Altogether after between 10 to 12 hours of work (!), the final poster was finished and ready to promote throughout the week.

The completed flyer, 11"x17"