Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Skateboard Painting

As I posted previously, I had a project to paint a skateboard deck for a themed gallery show that starts this weekend. Well, I finished it! Here's some progress shots:


Before putting any paint on I sanded the red finish that was on the board and then applied white spray primer, just plain ol' Krylon in the rattle can.


This is the background gradient. It's upside-down in this picture. I did the artwork using acrylic paints and brushes. This gradient didn't come out as well as I would have liked, but it looks okay.


Here's the finished board. I call it "Icarus Falls." The theme of the show is "Self-Propelled," and I think that the Icarus myth is one of the earliest (and obviously longest lasting) stories about self-powered flight, so it seemed appropriate.

For the sun at the top, I used actual astronomical photos for reference... I didn't just want a bright yellow ball, that's boring. There's a trail of feathers spiraling down from the sun to the figure, from the rapidly disintegrating wing.

Acrylic paint goes on pretty thick, so the sun and the figure had quite a bit of bumpy texture to them, which I didn't want the final board to have. Also, since it's a skateboard deck and it's possible that someone might actually put some trucks on it and use it, I wanted to put on a tough overcoat finish. I used polyurethane, again from a spray can. I put on about 12 coats, pretty much the entire can, sanding and steel-wooling between each coat. As the thickness built up I sanded down the high spots, so the final finish is perfectly smooth. I wanted to get it buffed to a very glossy mirror-slick finish like lacquer, but apparently the spray polyurethane won't do that, at least not with the buffer that I have. So it's a bit more matte than I wanted, but it's still a good finish and quite attractive and tough.

Well so that was fun. It goes on display this Saturday night, I will be at the opening party in the evening, so if you're in the Valley area come say hello! It's always a good party at this gallery and many of the artists will be there.

Meanwhile, there will be a comic this week, as work has calmed back down. I got the pencil, lettering and borders done last night and will ink it tonight. The past weekend turned out to be too full to do a comic, so I apologize for missing a week. It will happen from time to time as long as I'm going week-to-week; I hope to get a bit further ahead over the next couple months.

Back to work...

6 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

You know what I just realized?

We forgot to take a camera to the gallery event! D'oh!

-TGF

1:34 PM  
Blogger Wybe said...

skateboard looks great. did you use an unused one, or sandpapered all the scratches from an old one away?

9:30 AM  
Blogger Jeff Z said...

It was a fresh new unused board. It was already painted with a red finish, which is why I had to primer it.

5:01 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

yo i have a question, i do custom boards with spray and paintpens but would rather be doing them with acrylic, can the board shop actually sell them for usage with the paint on them if i do it that way. please email me back at matlit@hotmail.com thanks

8:26 PM  
Blogger tappwater7 said...

what grit sandpaper did u use when u sanded it down at first before primer and what grit did u use when u were sanding in between the clear coats??

11:25 PM  
Blogger Jeff Z said...

For the first sand before the primer I used 100, then 200 grit. For all the additional sands I started with 200, then went to 400, then to 00 and 000 steel wool.

I have a kind of fancy set of buffing and polishing stuff, which I could have used to slick and gloss the final, but I didn't have time.

Thanks for the question!

10:07 AM  

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