The Cage Skatepark - Art and Animation by TET

The Cage Logo.

Continuing on from my last post featuring my early cat art here's some more of my work from ten years later, around 1990-91.

The Cage Skatepark, Perth Western Australia, was the result of a collaborative effort between The Riverton Skatepark Inc., my sister and our group of skate boarding friends.

My sister needed somewhere to put the Vert Ramp she had bought from The Edge Skatepark in Fremantle, that had closed down. Which is how we became involved with Riverton's efforts to set up a park for their local skaters.

As part of my involvement, which included constructing most of the park's smaller ramps and obstacles, I designed its logo.

Monkey Character
by TET

Featuring a monster like character, adapted from a monkey character that I had been drawing in many different poses onto my friends skateboards, the design was used on T-Shirts, Letterhead, the park's sign and throughout the newsletter I published.

I even created a hand drawn (or more accurately 'mouse drawn') animated version which you can see at the beginning of The Cage video below.

On the right is a closer look at the T-Shirt version (slightly distorted due to the T-Shirt stretching).

If memory serves me correctly I think we had a screen with the stencil professionally applied then myself and my sister created a bit of a production line whilst I silk screened all the shirts we printed.

The logo was printed on the back of the shirt. On the front we printed a smaller 'pocket' logo that I designed. (see the image, right)

This was an earlier idea for a logo that was used prior to the park being opened. I think 'The Cage' lettering was added later, after the park was named (it was called 'The Cage' because it was located on a disused tennis court with high fencing all the way around).

Those of you familiar with my animation and video blog may recognise the artwork below which is from the same period. The character is the monster from the logo decked out in skateboarding gear.

This particular image appeared in one of The Cage's Newsletters alongside an article I wrote commenting on skateboarding fashions of the day.

What's interesting (to me at least) about the image above is that, through illustrating the newsletter I learnt a lot about the effect of using different line thicknesses in inking my drawings. How a thicker line could make parts of the drawing stand out more than others, creating a kind of depth to the image.