10 ASERO Banknote

Description:

The 10 ASERO banknote is the lowest denomination of the East Asian Central Bank’s AESRO currency system that is issued in a banknote format. The ASERO is the evolution of the ASEAN Currency Coalition; borne out of an initiative in East Asian and Southeast Asian countries to coalesce their diverse basket of monetary systems into a singular, unified system.

Idea:

This was the second attempt, after the 20 AFRO bill, that I made at doing something in the line of security printing. The inspiration for this project came from an assignment in my illustration class at UCLA. To read more about the thought process behind the idea to pursue currency design and security printing, I recommend checking out the 20 AFRO banknote page. Each week, I had to present a different illustration based on a mythic creature. For this particular art piece, the creature was the Chinese Taotieh, which you can see as the embedded watermark off in the bottom right corner of the banknote.

Process:

The 10 ASERO banknote was made in Adobe Illustrator and was among my first attempts at using blend modes in the program. The design of the bill was first roughly done on paper. Unfortunately, the rough sketch has since been lost.

Following off of the sketch, I used a custom print template in Illustrator and used a paper background texture to layer my vector work onto. The gradient tool was used to create the mock up of the holographic sticker in the top left corner of the bill.