Last Christmas my awesome husband (so weird to say that!) bought me a longboard, not just any longboard, a blank one! He knew I’d want to personalize it with some hand lettering. It took me a while to get around to actually painting it, mostly because I didn’t know what I wanted to draw but also because it was winter and there was no hope of taking it out for a spin. Since I can remember, I always thought the surfer/skater girls were the coolest, so this is my attempt at being a cool skater girl. I had different ideas for what I wanted to letter and changed my mind 3 times the day I sat down to paint it. I decided on makin’ waves because it reminds me of that surfer lifestyle and I like to think I’m makin’ waves with my lettering as I grow my business.
To sketch out the design, I initially traced my board on a large piece of paper (back side of wrapping paper) and then drew the design on the paper as I’d like it on the board. I changed my mind and didn’t like that design anymore but was out of wrapping paper so I used my iPad Pro instead. I measured the area I would be using for my design and then entered those numbers into Procreate.
I then used a pencil that can be easily erased to block out the letters, once they all had a box I sketched out the words. This part takes pretty long, ideally you would do this on paper and perfect it, then use a pounce wheel to outline the letters, place the scored paper on your board and then go over it with chalk dust. I didn’t have any more paper left and didn’t have the chalk powder so I tool the long route. You can read more about sign painting for beginners here.
I pulled out my Mack brushes (that haven’t been used in 9 months) and they weren’t doing too well. I had stored them with the bristles oiled but unfortunately the bristles were hard and clumped together. I did my best to clean them but it wasn’t as easy to paint as it was the last time. I’ll have to look into this and make sure I don’t do this again. Any advice is very welcome!
The whole process took a couple hours as I haven’t sign painted in quite a while. I’m really happy with the final product, I plan on coating it with a couple layers of polyurethane so the art work is a little more durable. You can see the process from beginning to end here in my youtube video!
