Scratched Pictures

Extinction Series by Todd Francis for Element Skateboards. All the decks are sold out but still great!

The Extinction series came after seeing a series of children’s books called How Do Dinosaurs…by Jane Yolen and Mark Teague. They’re these really upbeat kids books showing dinosaurs placed in different modern day social situations, where the dinosaurs are standing in for children at bedtime, during meals, etc. It got me to thinking how dinosaurs would actually react to our modern world if they got stuck living in a big city, where they’re completely unprepared to deal with dirty air, traffic and all the other crap. They’d wind up like those old people you see shuffling around with an oxygen tank hooked up to their nose, the kind of people you see and quickly look away. An awful, degraded existence where the only thing you have to look forward to is dying.
I came up with the concept and the drawings, and Matt Irving worked on the layout and colors. Its a series nobody talked about much, maybe in part because its not very “Element-y”, but I always liked it. – Todd Francis.