The 2006/07 winter was a rough one for me personally. To give you a hint, the 07/08 campaign was “Honesty is the New Black”, and the 2 boards were the Mixed Signals and the Trust Me. I’m not gonna get into the circumstances behind all this. That stuff’s not interesting, or really warrants a story. It happens to everyone. It’s a part of growth. But the significance of that season was that Automaton grew to become my vehicle for expression. This is why it keeps my sanity to this day. It’s the middle of the winter, graphics are due in a month, crap happens, and I have the freedom to completely change course. The Honesty theme was born.
I brought the art concept to Joe P. The idea was to show the double sided nature of people’s honesty. This led to the idea of a double sided graphic, a sort of nod to the “2 sides of the same coin” mentality. Another way to interpret the idea is that people have intentions they hide from you. You literally cannot see what they have behind their back, but experience should give you likely ideas. The double sided aspect ended up being a lot of tricky work since the subject needed to be rendered precisely from 2 different perspectives AND the art needed to line up perfectly on both sides. The project was initially contracted to a buddy in the skate industry, but he couldn’t pull off the double sided design.
It was tricky for Joe as well. He spent weeks trying to get all the elements to look right and as time was running out, we ended up ditching all his work for an idea he had 3 hours before deadline: using a xerox machine to reflect the character image on paper. I guess in retrospect, we could’ve done all this digitally, but that’s not Joe P’s style. Hand drawings all the way.
The Trust Me has become Automaton’s most recognized snowboard model.