Vans and Tumblr commissioned me for a series of gifs for the launch of their all-new weatherproof shoe collection. The product had to be featured mainly in all of the gifs, plus they had to be weather themed.
My first pair of Vans were red Rowleys I wore to chase after boys on skateboards as a teenager. I wanted to capture that feeling of carelessness like hanging out in parking lots.
For the art direction, I opted for traditional gouache drawings to highlight the new MTE in a personal yet stylish way. The tricky thing about gifs on Tumblr is that they can't be larger than 1.75 MB. When you use watercolor, there are naturally going to be a lot of different colored pixels. That's why I kept the background either floaty white or minimal. Additionally, I restricted the color palette, so I had some wiggle room regarding the length of the gif.
