My Approach to Deck Art

[Music] hey it's Chris from good rose let's talk graphics in most of the board building projects that I've done here on the channel I've kind of brushed over deck art and design and for good reason it's a difficult topic to approach just for some background my actual day job is graphic design a study graphic design and sculpture in college and I've been working as a digital and interface designer for more than 13 years I am literally a professional and having that kind of experience under my belt makes me feel certain ways about the art and graphics that go onto boards especially handcrafted ones art is personal and creative and expressive and there are infinite ways of doing and infinite ways of getting it right I don't want to get up on a podium and say this is how you make good art because whatever I'd end up saying would inevitably be wrong or incomplete you are a unique creative human and you should use whatever materials approaches and styles work for you in the art and graphics that look good to you will look different from the art and graphics that might look good to someone else and the art that you're able to make will look different depending on your skills and experience what's important is that you express yourself and make something that you enjoy and something that you're proud of so in this video I'm not gonna be prescriptive I'm not gonna tell you how to make good art that said graphics and heart are such a big part of these things that we make him ride and I think it's really important to address the topic in some way so here's what I thought I could do I'm gonna take you along with me as I add graphics to one of my decks I'm gonna discuss my approach the decisions that I have to make and kind of my thought process as I go through it and hopefully somewhere in there there'll be some useful nuggets of information that will help you develop your own style and get your decks looking that much better sound good great let's get started first we need a canvas this is a blank that I've had sitting around for a while it's the second deck that I pressed in the easy inexpensive DIY skateboard project the one that I pressed just by piling heavy stuff up on the mold it's a little smaller than a standard Street deck and the kick tails are super mellow and I've been watching a bunch of my Costra men's videos and it clicked that this might make a really good freestyle deck now I've never done any freestyle skating so I can't say for sure but I figured I'd give it a shot I've also been seeing some decks recently that have sort of a waist to him where they're thinner between the trucks I find that ideal really interesting so I wanted to give it a try so a symmetrical mellow waisted freestyle deck let's get cheeping I made a quick template traced it onto my board blank and brought it over to the bandsaw once it was cut out I brought the blank over to this soft sanding spindle to refine a profile and shape the rails then I ran over everything with a sanding block to get it smooth great and with that we have a deck let's put some art on it the base layer of any graphic you're gonna do is the wood of the deck which you can stain leave natural or completely cover up but when we go to add art on top of that a lot of different mediums that we could use will bleed into the wood of the deck and it'll leave your art looking really messy which we want to avoid lately I've been using lots of dyes alcohol inks and art markers for my graphics and they all bleed like crazy so at this point I hit my decks with a base coat to seal them up before adding any art this keeps my line work nice and clean I use a poly acrylic or polyurethane if I want the grain to show through or like in this case where I want a solid background color I hate it with a coat of spray paint next it's time to start figuring out kind of the general composition and layout of your graphic let me address some considerations you might have as you're thinking about composition one thing that sets deck art apart from other more pure fine arts is that at the end of the day it's gonna be part of a usable mechanical object trucks get bolted to it and eventually different parts of the deck are gonna get worn out based on whatever style of writing you do and that can be really helpful to keep in mind as you're thinking about your layout I like to pay particular attention to the area around where the trucks will go because the trucks are gonna partially obscure certain parts of the deck and completely cover others and personally I don't want to do a whole bunch of cool art just to have it covered up so I tend to leave the area under the trucks pretty simple another thing to think about is that the trucks divide the deck visually kind of making a frame within a frame so what is the actual canvas you're working on is it this is it the whole deck or is it this is it the area framed by the trucks either way can work and so can a balance between the two it's just something you want to be thinking about as you move through your design okay back to the deck in question I've done a bunch of directional decks lately where I'm aiming to divide the graphic by the golden ratio this is kind of like cheating because the proportions involved automatically look pleasing to us if you get them right the deck that I'm working on here though is symmetrical so I wanted to break away from that motif I wanted to try to tackle something a little bit more balanced while still playing with the high contrast black white and single pop color theme that I've been working in lately there was something about this deck shape that made me want to have a really geometric design kind of a throwback to some of the old vision decks from the 80s so I gave myself some layout lines using a compass and a pencil and started filling in my blocks of color lately I've really been enjoying the speed and control you can get from good markers and paint pens playing with the different amounts of transparency leads to all kinds of possibilities and I'm also a really big fan of subtle texture when you're filling in a big area of color with markers there's always going to be lines where the strokes overlap but by keeping those strokes consistent we can make something that looks intentional and something that has visual interest instead of just looking like scribbles one of the ways that I've liked doing this recently makes this really cool ribbed effect that I don't think you could really get any other way after filling in my blocks of color I felt that my orange on white contrast here was looking a little weak the ink came out a little lighter than I expected on the white base layer so the edges of the shapes don't look very well-defined to my eyes so I decided to outline them first I was hoping I could get nice clean lines with a compass but I didn't have the right attachments to draw big enough circles with the markers I'm using which meant I had to do my inking by hand [Music] and here we come up against one of my shortcomings as an artist my hands aren't very steady but I've known that for years it doesn't stop me here's how I get around that I embrace the shaky lines instead of trying to make perfect lines and stressing out when inevitably I can't get them right I just make wavy lines part of the aesthetic and that leads me really neatly into one piece of advice that I do feel completely confident giving intentional looks good but unintentional looks like a mistake you can always do things that look messy or chaotic but you have to make sure that they look like they were done that way on purpose in my case I even went as far as to redraw the lines I made with the compass they were too clean and the contrast between those lines and my hand-drawn ones looked really jarring once all of the lines in my design looked kind of wavy the whole deck looked more cohesive and much better and I think these heavy black lines go a long way towards locking the shapes in place and making everything look more solid and louder which is fun lately a lot of my decks have had a single kind of iconographic piece of art that's the focal point of the whole design this board is gonna try to accomplish the same thing but be a slightly different take on it since the deck is symmetrical instead of directional I made the main focus of the graphic dead in the center this will be the place to the most visual interest and your eye will get pulled in by the surrounding bull's eye pattern also I should mention because that is a pattern and we're pattern-seeking animals it doesn't matter that parts of it are going to be obscured by the trucks our brains will automatically fill in whatever's being hidden that's one of the advantages of keeping the area under the truck simple and putting the detailed work in the center or on the nose and tail as for the subject of the graphic I have a fun theme that I've been playing with lately that are gonna like a lot and that's food I know a lot of decks have skulls and stuff on them skulls are cool I've done some decks with skulls but you know what I like more than skulls food food is great the deck that I pressed along with this one ended up being an orange I thought it would be cool to keep with the orange theme and make them a set so I decided to try a creamsicle I realized later on that I drew an orange popsicle on my orange popsicle deck and my graphic ended up having an accidental built-in joke and that makes me so much happier than if I had done it on purpose sometimes life is just cool like that anyway I started drawing out a cartoonish cream skull using a bunch of reference images from Google I lightly sketched out the basic design with a pencil to make sure my proportions looked good before moving on to my markers if you mess up you can erase the pencil paint not so much I got my outlines and basic shapes inked in and hey that's looking pretty good looks like ice cream I went back in with a fine black marker to refine some of my outlines and add some of this sort of hash stippling that I like to use to imply shapes [Music] and at this point I thought I might be done but it's always good to come back to a design with fresh eyes and when I looked at this the next morning I wasn't happy with it the popsicle emblem was just too light and was getting overpowered by the bullseye pattern if I wanted to succeed in getting that part of the graphic to be the focal point of the design I needed to get it to grab your attention better than the surrounding elements and here's how I went about doing that first fatter bolder outlines the weight of these lines gives your eyes something to latch on to and helps distinguish the center ice cream graphic from the background also you'll notice that the lines aren't any even with I'm varying my line thickness to help me convey perspective and also to help with some shading to better to find the shape of the popsicle [Music] the other decision I made to help this part of the graphic stand out was to introduce more colors this provides even more contrast and sets the ice cream image apart from the monochromatic background okay now that's something I'm happy with the last step is to hit it with a clear coat to protect your art and then it's time to get it set up and try it out works pretty good and I think the graphic looks awesome up in that rail position and that's the whole point isn't it that's all a board graphic really needs to do look cool and if your board art looks cool to you Congrats dude you win I hope that by showing my thought processes I go about making a graphic that I've given you some new ideas new information and new things to consider that could help you make your boards that much better art is subjective and it's a skill that you build with practice but if you're a beginner that doesn't mean you can't make something cool right now think about composition contrast and color think about where you want the viewers attention and how you're gonna get it there and be smart and creative with the materials you have available to make something engaging and interesting to look at there's no single right way to do this there are as many ways to succeed in making a board graphic as there are people out there making boards so get to it get out there and make yourself some boards if you liked the video subscribe I highly recommend that you do we have a good time this is the kind of thing we do here tons of DIY board sport type projects if you got any questions about my process board design or graphic design in general leave a comment down below I really do try to reply to as many as possible as always thanks for coming along on the journey and until next time I'll see you soon

Channel: Good Roads

Views: 2,675

Keywords: skateboarding, skate, boarding, longboarding, skating, diy, custom, art, graphics, deck art, deck, board

Id: j7zXZF_6dBg

Length: 12min 2sec (722 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 03 2020