Client: Spec
Project: Colorado Avalanche Hockey
Designed: June 2001
So I'll admit it. I'm a huge hockey fan, and especially a huge Colorado Avalanche fan, so when the Av's won the NHL Stanley Cup in 2001 I was ecstatic.
I was also stuck riding BART into San Francisco everyday while building the CDAM software for Psoom, so I had a lot of time to kill. Enter one super-thin high-powered laptop (that I had to give back) which had just enough battery life to go from Fremont to Civic Center on one charge, and I had all the makings of a fun personal project.
Usually I don't like showing off uncommissioned work, but I liked the abstract nature of these pieces enough, that I decided they should live on. Or maybe it has something to do with that part I mentioned about being a huge hockey fan.
Truthfully, these are probably two of the most difficult illustrations I've ever built. They're vector artwork created entirely in Adobe Illustrator and built totally by hand. No auto-trace. No image-conversion utilities. Just a whole lot of time and patience.
Looking back on it, I'm actually amazed that I was able to complete them in the short time I did. The Patrick Roy illustration was completed first and took a little over 2 weeks, which works out to about 32 hours give-or-take, and the Ray Bourque illustration went much faster and completed in about half that time.
