Concept to Design to Final Product

For those of you who know me, you know I'm obsessed with process. I'm going to show you here how an idea goes from concept, to design, to final, in one blog post instead of a million-and-two posts.

So, the Portland Ultimate Summer League put out a call for designs. Originally, I submitted this design:

But they decided they liked a sportier example of a drawing style I sent, so I came up with the idea of having a similar concept to that example--a frisbee player throwing a fiery frisbee. I wanted, obviously, to make sure the frisbee player looked like he was actually in action... So I took some references:

I drew up some sketches (not pictured here because I didn't scan them in), and then finally captured the energy of the piece with the sketch below:

And then I went from there to final...!