History says our fine president Abraham Lincoln was quite the grappler in his youth. This was the inspiration behind this quote design, done for Kentucky for Kentucky. I started in Photoshop with an exaggerated character sketch of a young Abe, clean shaven, bare chested, and ready to mess someone up. I then created each word of the text and the decorations by hand to retain a more rustic feel. This was then taken into Illustrator for conversion to vector where I arranged the items as they appear.
The colors were sampled from a vintage 'Lincoln Birthplace' postcard. The flower in the & is the Kentucky state flower, the goldenrod. The wrestling belt on the horns contains the presidential seal and Lincoln's birth and death years. I also included a small illustration of his birthplace.
This was a previous version with different paper dimensions. They chose to print on 12x14 so I had to make some changes.