A lowbrow, skateboard inspired pattern design for SportTape

This graphic was born after chatting with Carl from SportTape, who sent me some infos visual references & Pinterest pins. The idea was to create something powerful, energetic, edgy. For me, all the inspiration for this kind of stuff come from the skateboard art world, and most of my clients are looking for the same thing: something that’s gonna look like is coming out straight from a 90s skate shop.

It’s the typical conversation that happens before starting every freelance illustration work, exchanging ideas to see how and if you’re aligned and ready to go. We agreed on a couple concepts to create something that could be repeated as a pattern on a sport tape.

If you don’t know what it is (like me before googling it), sport tape is used as a support to joints and reduce pain, improving physical activity and get better performances.

Sport Tape - Sketch

Here’s the first sketch, as you can see something has been scraped off, but most of it has been kept till the end. A sick angry skull, a flaming dumbbell, a tattooed gorilla, a punk skull with his eyes popping ogg, a flaming shoe, a flying eyeball and a couple other things.

Sport Tape - colored pattern

This is one of the preview of the finished pattern, now I’m gonna show you a couple pictures of the finished product.

Sport Tape boxes

Sport Tape positioning

Thumb Tape boxes

As you can see, it came out great even on the packaging box! They did a finger tape with just the lightning bolts, and a standard tape with all the doodles.