Camp Pendleton,CA. in the 80s style

Graphic Design

Camp Pendleton is a military base in north county San Diego. I always thought of is as just that, a big ol place where militia goes to receive training of all kinds; apparently it is also a city. I can’t find much about it, so I decided to make today’s graphic to look like it could belong in a movie poster from the 80’s.

Based on this movie poster right here:

Iron Eagle Movie poster

a 3D treatment of the type, with the flag’s colors, ’cause ‘merica!
I didn’t do a sketch on this one, just went directly to try and achieve the 3d effect in illustrator; turns out, my computer could not handle what I was asking of it, so it crashed illustrator.

I then tried something in Photoshop and just gave up, it was taking much more time than what I was willing to put on to this project.

Back at illustrator, I worked with the perspective one-point grid to get the letters in to the perspective you see them in this poster, and then proceeded to draw the 3D effect panel by panel. I know there are better ways to achieve this, so I will try a different way another day.

Once I got it to look right, It seem like it needed something, so I just added a tank. Not much reasoning behind that to be honest.

Quite different from yesterday’s neon graphic, and yet, still very 80s.

By the way, I have not seen Iron Eagle or know what it is about,

Eighties series, Chula Vista California

Graphic Design

The main Idea is to make all the San Diego County cities into 80’s logos or graphics, as often as possible. For today’s graphic, I did Chula Vista, California. Beautiful city, not that famous as a tourist attraction, and yet, it has hiking trail, horse trails, beach, beautiful suburbs, etc.

Downtown Chula Vista has a circular sign which you will see if you search for the city. I based today’s graphic in that sign.

I think it looks more like a beer logo than an 80’s graphic, what do you think?

San diego eighties landsacape t-shirt for both male and female now available at Red bubble

Eighties Series

Graphic Design

5 years later… In a world where Corona has become a feared word, you need a face mask to go outside, and the closest you can come to a human being is 6ft. What started as 15 days is now what feels like a million years going on 5 months. We have survived murder hornets, raging fires, heat waves, sudden inland winds of up to 145 MPH, riots, and double hurricanes.

In this post-apocalyptic world, your writer re-starts the blog. With a sudden obsession for 80’s graphics and oh, so much time on her hands. As an effort to keep my skills sharp and bring some distraction to the unsuspecting reader, I’m making a series of graphics based in the eighties esthetics, with all its glorious gradients, and textures, and loud colors, and type treatments that bring you right back to the, now, end of the previous century.

First up is the most famous landscape of the City of San Diego, CA. I started it up as a simple sketch in photoshop, based on several photos.

San Diego_Landscape-Sketc and inspiration

You can see the inspiration of both the 80’s graphics and the pictures the sketch is based on

After this, some color blocking, that makes it easier to interpret once I move to vector format in Illustration.

Color sketch

You can start to see the idea, I also decided to add a little sailboat, to emphasize the water. I went crazy with the gradients here. Afterwards, I took the sketch to illustrator and traced all the buildings, the sun, the sailboat, played with the typeface and colors until I ended up with this:

Final product of the eighties looking san diego landscape
Color sketch

This looked like it would look great on a t-shirt,

San diego eighties landsacape t-shirt for both male and female now available at Red bubble

I’d love to hear your thoughts, whether they are on the world we are living in, or the graphic you see.

PS if you click on the image, it takes you to my Redbubble shop, where you can get the t-shirts or other products with this graphic printed on it.