Repainting My Longboard
I’ve seen videos everywhere recently of people customizing their shoes, rooms, skateboards, hydroflasks, and almost anything else that can be painted or drawn on. Some of the most common things people customize their belongings with are cartoon characters or memes of those characters. Young artists are transferring their favorite digital creations to physical objects and turning them into icons they can display in the tangible world. Since I have a longboard that I never use and I wasn’t too attached to the monstera leaf design it came with, I decided I was going to take the concept of digital media being reintroduced to physical media objects and make my own longboard customization video.
I have a whole list of cartoon characters I love enough to paint on my board, but I’m not particularly good at painting faces and I wanted to take a more abstract approach to the idea. After a lot of scrolling on Pinterest and some research about the different types of Mod Podge carried at Michael’s, I came up with the idea to paint half the board to look like an old tv screen that had lost signal and to glue ripped up newspapers on the other half. I initially wanted to burn the edge of the newspaper where it would meet the paint so it would look like the paper was burning up to reveal a tv screen, but after some experimentation, I realized the burnt edges were too brittle to glue on the board and didn’t have the look I was going for. In the end, I painted the torn newspaper with some thinned out brown paint and black paint on the very edges to fake the burnt look. I used slightly duller colors on the tv screen part than was realistic because I wanted to remind myself that old television sets are also somewhat outdated media technology.
It took me four total days to finish the project, and then another day to do a photoshoot with my friend at various aesthetic locations around my neighborhood. I’m extremely happy with how it turned out, and I no longer feel guilty about not using the board I bought because I’m planning to display it somewhere in my room where it can never get scuffed and scratched up from riding.
