Go Vipers!

Just finished this little project up, been doing a lot of vector art lately and thought this might be a nice simple loose step by step.

My good friend Greg McMillin asked me to design a logo for his son Hank's hockey team, Greg had some ideas of what he liked and showed me some other Viper logos that had elements in them that he thought were interesting, but wanted me to do a custom one based on his ideas.

Here are the rough thumbnail sketches, I will usually do a page or two of all sorts of concept directions, but Greg gave pretty good direction on what he wanted to see. After checking these out, he went with option A.





Now that I know he wants this direction, I do a tighter pencil...
by tighter I don't mean finished art line work, tighter meaning overall design, getting all the curves and details of the snake and positions where I like them.

Once I'm OK with the pencil, I scan this and bring it into Illustrator.





Now that it's in Illustrator, I place it on it's own layer and lock it. I also like to make my pencil layer really transparent, about 15%-20% opacity, this way I can still see it but it will not compete visually with the vector lines I am drawing.

I throw a layer over the top of this and start drawing vector lines.





Here is the finished vector logo, hope you like it!