Wood as canvas
Designing and painting skate decks is a liberating task for the creative mind.
I started out here by making my own skate decks a few years back as an experiment and it’s not that difficult, but it requires an amount of patience and some expensive tools.
Painting skateboard decks is quite satisfying and decorating them with the materials you’ll soon see is an adventure. Until now I’ve had mixed results for the most part, but we’re both glad that some of them have turned out quite wonderful.
Over the last few years we have created a small stock of board art for the Series 1 release. I have shown small areas of some of these projects before but not in their entirety.
Of the ten decks featured here, there are a few different styles including leather-backed, painted, as well as oil-rubbed with a paint decoration. Exploring my style and the topics has been pretty rewarding. From the natural world silhouettes, automotive, skateboard world art, and even otherworldly manuscripts to floating space elevators.
…and these are the more straightforward designs!
The decks are intended as art for your wall, but most of these are surely skate-able.
I will leave up the designs that sell as an archive of my creations, so if you’d like a deck with a similar design, just reach out for a commission and we’ll see what we can do for you.
Canvas
Want to make art? Instead of doing the glue up and starting from scratch, get yourself some skate deck blanks and start there. It's just more liberating. We buy the nicest boards we can find from American factories, but you can even find seconds to paint on if you search.
Later you can revisit the idea of the making of the entire skate deck from maple veneer sheets in massive multi-ton vises or vacuum bags. It’s pretty awesome.
Painting on a deck is a somewhat complex but satisfying canvas. The geometry is odd, but not difficult. Prep work is similar to painting on wood panels which are much stiffer that canvas.
Debut Series
The first available range of deck art we’re releasing are simply the decks that go well together here. The designs that should follow are a little too ambitious for an initial release.
While painting on skate decks is not a new art form for me, it is certainly my first foray in a fully dedicated effort to sell art to the public.
Cream Co isn’t purely a skateboard company, but we do now sell skateboard decks, and likely more related to skating and outdoor sports. We’ll let you decide whether our decks should be used on the streets and ramps or on your wall for zoom calls.
We still do digital design for clients, so I’m hoping the strategy of using our already formed LLC as a vehicle to sell art online will work in tandem with that.
We hope you like what we’ve collected so far. It’s been a journey and I’m happy we’ve finally launched the site.
Release schedule
Two or so new decks every Tuesday at noon Pacific until all ten are released.
Hopefully we'll keep releasing decks every Tuesday beyond this.