It's about to get gnarly up in here

Totally radicalus broseph. TOTALLY.

I've had a new little project for the last week or so. Joel got himself some new trucks and decided to celebrate with an all new deck. What did that mean to me? It meant a brand new skateboard with nothin on it. After some hesitancy, our good friend produced a huge box of high quality spray paints...left by Chaz for some unknown reason. And what good is a box of paints if it ain't being put to use right? So I got to work on a stencil, my first ever, to embark on the great skate design adventure.
The stencil creation was all a bunch of photoshop work, cleaning up messy scanned lines, tweaking spots that wouldn't hold together on cutout, and getting a color laid down. I'll post that layout a little later...forgot to bring it with me.

Then, it was on to cutting out the stencils. Now here's where I'm going to give you a tip so PAY ATTENTION AND STOP LOOKING AT THOSE PORNS.

Don't use office folders to make stencils. Go pay the extra 5 bucks or whatever and get that acetate plastic shit. You will thank me when the spray paint doesn't stick to your stencils and fuck up your picture.

Ok, so I cut out a bunch of stencils (3 layers each for the dude and the rocket) and sanded the original yellow coat off the deck. Here's what it looked like before:

Now that I got all that yellow off, it was prepped and ready for HOT SPRAY ACTION. Luckily, Saturday happened to be a freaking gorgeous day...

Me and Joel started off by getting in the mood for spray painting, which involved a lot of grunting and stupid facial expressions. Just keepin it gangsta if you would...

Then I actually started painting...

And painting

And then I ran into a snag...FUCKING NEWSPRINT. Sand sand sand sand sand, tape, cover...

Back to work! And oh shit it's dark and I'm still painting let's call it a day for now

Sunday went much the same, though now I was done with my background and could move on to laying down the details. And let me tell you I had some problems. Thing is, I've never worked with spray paint before, so I was a little bit questionable on drying times. What i learned is that spray paint dries to the touch REALLY fast....only it doesn't dry enough for a stencil to lay down on it. So there were a lot of little parts that had to get a whole lot of extra layers laid down. I started off by laying down J-Stizzle's name and a block of white for our astro man.

Then moved on to the facial shadow for a little 3d effect

After a whole lot of waiting for things to dry, I moved on to the money...the last detail stencil for our intrepid gentleman adventurer and the beginnings of the blast trails of his rocketship.

Notice the f-ups on the star above....those are all from stencils that decided to pick up paint. bastards. In fact, most of my day on Saturday was devoted to fixing up these little f-ups...to the point where I ended up doing all my finishing work on Monday during sick time. Fun fun.

I moved outside due to a serious amount of fumes in our tiny apartment and performed a few final touchups

When all was said and dry (har har), here's what we ended up with!

Holy crap I made a skateboard!

I can't tell you guys how much fun I had working on this. It was a great inspiration to work on more stuff, and a really enjoyable medium to work with. So expect more spray paintings in the future, especially now that I know how to make stencils.

The board still needs a little sanding and a clear coat of varnish...then it'll be all set to get totally fucked up by Joel! Yay!!!

If you want to see more pictures, you should go over here.