Screenprinting My Own Skateboard Decks!

i screen printed these skateboard decks myself and i want to show you how i did it back in may of 2020 i made an order with a popular skateboard manufacturer and distributor to get a stack of blank decks that i could print myself it's something that i've always wanted to do and as you might expect due to the pandemic and supply chain issues i didn't get those decks for a long time in fact i had to wait about seven months before they finally came i was pretty busy during december and january so i wasn't really able to tackle the task of printing the boards but that did give me some time to think about what i wanted to put on them the first step that i had to go through before i could even print anything was to make the screens that i was going to print with i'd already built the frames out of 2x2 douglas fir my frames are 16 inches wide and 24 inches long and i got some screen mesh from amazon although i also often buy it from dick blick as well and i just staple it as tight as i can onto the frames and for my purposes i ended up stretching three frames two of them had 160 mesh and then i also made another one that had 200 mesh which is a little finer of a weave [Music] i coated the screens with jacquard photo emulsion that's the brand that i usually use because speed ball comes in a much larger jar and i don't always use it fast enough so the smaller jar of photo emulsion that jakarta makes seems to work better for me so i coated all my screens and then i just put them under the sink to dry in the dark so that they don't get ruined here's another view of me coating the screen i use an aluminum scoop coater and that really helps spread out that emulsion nice and even and not too thick so one of the things that i wanted to do is make a graphic with some sort of appropriated anime imagery and so i had previously gridded out this pencil drawing of a character from a series called bubblegum crisis and then i just needed to ink it and this is going to become my line art for one of the skateboard graphics i thought the inking came out pretty good especially after i went back over it and kind of thickened up some lines i scanned that liner in and brought it into photoshop and used that to build up the different layers that i wanted to print to make up this graphic so i have a white layer that's a base coat and then one color is for the shirt and then another color for the skin tone and then black line art so i'm kind of going to rely on the color of the skateboard deck itself to be the hair color of this character you have to print out a transparency of each layer that you want to print as solid black and you also need to design your image to have something called trap which means the different layers have a little bit of overlap so that you can get away with some slight misregistration the other graphic that i wanted to do was based on this old vintage metal toy ironing board that i found in a dumpster that had this image of these owls on it and i just think it's like really fun and kind of cute and so i took a photo of that and brought that into photoshop as well and prepped that into a two layer image so i'm just using this old laser printer that i got from a thrift store for five dollars to print out transparencies of the different layers that i'm going to need to make screens of and use those as the films to burn the screens this laser printer was only five dollars and the regular paper tray doesn't work but fortunately the bypass tray works so i can just manually insert my transparencies and for five dollars with toner inside that's a pretty killer deal so once i had my films made i could use them to expose the screens that i had previously coded some people like to make two transparencies of the same image that they're exposing to make it extra opaque but i've had good luck with just a single film for exposing my screen i exposed the screen under some photo lights that i have and then i just go through my kitchen sink to wash it out it's nice that my sink has one of those spray hoses because it really speeds up the process here i am burning another screen this is for the base layer of the owl graphic and i place the transparency under a sheet of glass so it holds it nice and flat so i can get the sharpest image possible in my screen [Music] after i've washed them out and they've dried i need to tape up the edges of the screen so that when i am printing none of the ink can squeeze out and make a mess some people use cheap packing tape to line the edges of their screen but i like spending the money to get actual screen printing tape because i think it works better for me so i grabbed a stack of the blanks that i got and got ready to print them i first need to set up a jig for printing the skateboard decks so i have these two pieces of wood that have some bolts sticking out of them that can fit into the inner truck holes on the skateboard deck and then i can set up my screen in these screen printing clamps so it can flip up and down on hinges so i can remove the skateboard deck and then put in a new one and continue the printing process so the first thing i need to do is just get things lined up so that it's printing in the location on the skateboard deck that i want then i use some screws to just screw those little pieces of wood in place and now i'll be able to remove the skateboard deck and put a new one on every time i print one [Music] once i was confident i had everything set up the way i intended i got out my white ink and this is going to be the base layer on this graphic i'm just using regular speed ball poster ink and i've found it works pretty well the tricky thing about printing skateboard decks is the concave it's not a flat surface so for everyone that i print i have to try and use my fingers to bend the blade of the squeegee to conform to the curvature of that concave and i've found in this process that if the layer that you're printing is more centrally located it's a little bit easier one problem that i continually ran into in this process was getting ink that was squeezing out and under my screen so oftentimes i was having to clean that up so that i wouldn't get any bleeding of the ink you can see on that last one right there it had a nice bleeding edge that i had to clean up later after i finished printing a layer then i just need to clean up the screen with water and it can be reused again if i want this is what the boards look like with that first layer printed i think they came out pretty good [Music] once they dried sufficiently then i just needed to set up to print my second layer so i just threw my screen into the clamps and then i start aligning it to get the correct registration and then tighten the clamps down i chose to do two graphics so that i could kind of get some practice with something a little bit easier before moving on to something that had more colors so that's why this aloe graphic is only two layers just white ink and blacking because i just wanted to get my feet wet with the process i've definitely done plenty of screen printing before but usually just one color or if i was doing multiple colors it was just on paper which is a flat surface and a lot easier to work with so i would consider this a much more advanced project at least for my skill set just like i mentioned before i kept running into the issue of having ink get under the screen because it was squeezing out there's a lot of reasons for this one is that because the deck has that concave the edges of the deck are as much as 3 8 or a half of an inch away from the screen so that's quite a bit of a gap which allows ink to seep through and then also i mostly had trouble with this black ink for some reason it tended to be a bit runnier than any of the other colors i had so in the future i might look into some kind of additive that can give the ink a little more body you can see some of that smearing of the ink seeping through the screen happened on this particular deck but since the graphic was pretty simple i was able to sort of clean up those mistakes by hand with a damp paper towel after i was done printing boards with the owl graphic i removed the screen printing tape from my screens and used emulsion remover to soften the emulsion that was on those screens so that i could rinse them out and reclaim them and use them again since i needed to print some more boards but with a different graphic [Music] now that i had some experience printing skateboard decks i definitely felt a little more comfortable moving into something that was more complicated and had more layers to it this particular graphic is gonna have four colors but i only have three screens so on the fourth screen i burned the image of two different colors that were to be printed since they were just smaller areas and i can just block them off with some screen printing tape while i'm printing one of the two colors just like before i lined the edges of my frames with screen printing tape so that ink couldn't seep out and make a mess i was really excited to print this particular graphic but i was also nervous because i had already been running into some issues with my previous attempts with the owl boards but hopefully the experience that i had already gained would really help me with this challenge so i have my three screens all burned and taped up and ready to go and so really it's just a matter of going through the same process you can see that i taped down my main line art transparency on a board and used that to do the initial registration for that white base layer that i'm going to print and then also the same as before i just get out my white screen printing ink and i lay a bead at the top of the screen and i start printing the first pass is always difficult especially because right there i wasn't flooding the screen which is something that a lot of screen printers normally do but i've always had mixed results this is flooding the screen where you make a pre-pass before printing onto the object that you're printing as long as things are going correctly it's really satisfying to see that base layer get printed onto the surface of the boards this particular graphic was going to require some custom colors so i had to mix up my own from some ink that i had i have your basic primary colors and white and black so that's perfect for mixing up those custom colors i was going to need a skin tone and also a color of ink for the shirt on the character i decided to print some boards with pink and some boards with a blue shirt so i mixed up two colors for the shirt of course aside from that i also had to mix up a skin tone which was a bit more difficult to figure out but i think i'm pretty happy with how my custom colors came out i decided to print the skin tone layer first since all the boards with this graphic would be receiving that exact same color and i saved the shirts for later since i was gonna be doing some with pink and some with light blue it's really cool seeing the graphics start to come together layer by layer and even just having this second color on there was really rewarding i really felt like i was doing something you can see that i used a piece of tape on the underside of the screen to block out the shirt area while i printed the skin tone and while i print the shirt area i have tape under that skin tone section so that no ink can leak through now we're really starting to get somewhere because we have that pop of color on the character's shirt and now i'm getting really excited to see what it's going to look like once i finally get the final layer on it that has the line art [Music] it's always such a chore to always be rinsing out the screens but i guess it's just part of the process like i mentioned i wanted to print the shirt in a couple different colors just so that there's more variety in all the prints that i was doing and this blue came out a little duller than i originally intended but i think it still looks pretty good and i'm pretty happy with it at long last and after many hours of work i finally got to print the final layer that has the black ink liner i think the most exciting thing was that very first pull to see that i was successful in what i was doing and i was so happy and it was a lot of work because i was actually printing 30 boards with this graphic and i don't live in a large apartment so it took up a lot of space once all the printing was done it was mostly a matter of cleaning things up reclaiming my screens and setting them out to dry but i did have one last step and that was to just spray the boards with some satin clear coat to seal that graph again nicely i'm really happy with how these boards came out i think the graphics look great and i'm so excited to see how they look on the different colors of boards that i got and the best part is now i have some decks that i printed myself and that's really cool i can skate them my friends can skate them and it's just kind of fun to see thanks for watching music in this video comes courtesy of isaac chalice eaton's album's 85 degree night and falls off a cliff check them out on bandcamp

Channel: Marshmallow Island

Views: 72,347

Rating: 4.9859533 out of 5

Keywords: marshellow island, marshmellowisland, screenprinting, screen printing, skateboarding, skateboards, skateboard decks, skateboard deck, diy

Id: loZYD5jCuD8

Length: 17min 38sec (1058 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 24 2021