These 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' skateboards are pretty rad
Growing up in the town of Toyama, Japan, illustrator Kentaro Yoshida always drew characters from his favourite manga series, such as Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball, and television shows based around bōsōzoku or motorcycle gangs.
It's those thick, bold black lines so often seen in manga that have become a strong feature of Yoshida's work. And the style is apparent in his totally rad Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles skateboards, which he's created for the DVD release of the Michael Bay-ified (is that a good thing?) movie, TMNT: Out of the Shadows.
Yoshida, who also watched the television series as a child, said the film version offered up more visual details to his eye -- a far cry from the relatively simple cel animation of the original '90s series.
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"I realised there are a lot more details in the costumes and the props, it's a way different design than the comic. Obviously in the Ninja Turtles comic, they only have different colours of their mask," he explained to Mashable Australia.
"But in the movie, there are so many other details to personalise each of the characters."
With most of his illustrations, Yoshida starts off with a sketch and builds from there. The skateboards took about three days to complete, and he's sketched the turtles too: Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo and Raphael.
Much of Yoshida's work fuses Japanese art with that of the west, where he has absorbed himself in the surf and skate culture of Australia -- a place he has lived in for more than one decade.
"There are these visual cultures in surfing and skateboarding ... these are things I'd never seen before I decided to come here," he admitted.
As for creative inspiration, Yoshida has a weird little habit when it comes to the music he puts on while drawing.
"When draw with my hand, with a pen on canvas or whatever, I tend to listen to band music -- music created by human hands. But when I'm colouring or designing in Illustrator, I listen to digital music. It gets me into the zone," he explained.
Whatever the inspiration, these illustrations are sure to impress any pizza party.
