In August, the Obama campaign was running a contest for the next Obama T-shirt. I thought to myself “Self, you don’t like John McCain, and you certainly don’t like Sarah Palin. You DO like drawing, fresh ideas, and what Barack Obama will bring to this mess of a country that we’re living in.” So I decided to whip something up for this shirt contest. I was thinking about what would make a good piece for this particular project, and figured that putting Barack Obama’s face on a tee for the Barack Obama campaign made some sense, so I started there. I fleshed out the portrait in a couple of hours, employing this new layered drawing technique I’ve been developing.

Once the portrait was done, I wanted to get some complimentary elements into the piece. I added a flurry of Obama logos and some of those concentric circles that I’ve been beating into the ground since 2006. I mocked it up on their template and submitted it.

For some reason, the submission never showed up on the page. Not sure why. It could have been that I just didn’t do it right (even though I tried a few times), or the contest couldn’t handle the big, fat wad of coolness that I was shoving down its throat.

So now I had this illustration that didn’t have a purpose. I decided that I should turn it into a poster and let people download it for free. I posted it to my Behance profile, but was too busy with other projects at the time to really push it. About a week later, I was putting some stuff together for Deck Peck and thought this poster/shirt design/whatever it had become would make a pretty cool deck. We submitted the illustration on a skate deck and it was well received enough for Urban Outfitters to feel the burning desire to sell it. Woo hoo! Go America.

You can buy the deck here. Buy it, get some fishing wire, and put it on your wall.

Here are some in progress images of the piece:

This is the finished poster. The aged look worked better on the poster than it did on the deck, so I left the deck clean.