The WWF SmackDown Champion belt was an odd choice for a project, primarily because there are a plethora of WWF Title belt replicas commercially available; at any given moment, if you were to do a simple search on eBay with the keywords "wwf belt," you're sure to get about a hundred hits. So with so many prefab WWF belts to choose from, why make another? Well, the answer's simple: none of these belts say "SmackDown" and, since I'm on a roll, it's more fun to make!

This belt, like the Ready 2 Rumble World Champ belt, is another rip-off on an existing belt design; the elements are very similar to the WWF World Heavyweight Champion belt (recently retired). For some reason, the WWF almost always has an eagle on the main plate of their Heavyweight Champion belt, so I wanted to have that element in the SmackDown plate. It took almost three days of scouring the Net to find just the right vector image of an eagle.

In the original WWF World Heavyweight Champion belt, the eagle is flanked by two globes, and early versions of my design imitated this. But since I wasn't implying that this was a "world" championship, I decided to replace the globes with caricatures of the WWF Superstars the Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin. And having them in the main plate design made it a logical choice to use their (in)famous icons in the side plates, as well; the Brahma Bull on the left and the Stone Cold Skull on the right.

While this belt wasn't as fun to design as the other ones, since it's elements were mostly "borrowed," it's still a more appropriate trophy for SmackDown than a prefab WWF replica belt!

(Wrestling fans may notice a couple of errors in the images used in the plates: the caricature of the Rock shows him raising his left eyebrow instead of his right, the WWF logo is missing a squiggle at the very top of the "F" and the typeface used in the "SMACKDOWN" titling is not exactly the same as the one used on TV or in the game.)

Here are some images of the finished belt: