HH's Grade 10 Art: January 2010

Coming back from the winter break I was one of the fortunate students whose board had not been damaged. We were assigned to create 5 different stencils on the winter break, which I had:

For my preliminary deck I choose the one which had the Canadian flag on it. After consulting Ms. Cockburn about it I was told that because the Canadian flag is a logo I would not be able to use it. For that class I was planning to start the preliminary decks but had to go back to brainstorming.

After some research on the computer I came to the decision that I would like to include the design of the checkered board from the Canadian flag board and added some new ideas:

my name in the middle of the board, I looked on the Internet and many of the boards that had writing on them seemed nice to me

a second set of checkers on top of the name with an arch above that

above the arch would be a crescent with a star, which was a design I choose myself

and finally on top of the design I had some symmetrical lines

I put these together on one of the preliminary boards and I was very happy with the result I got.

For the second board I decided to change around the colours for everything but was not as happy, I liked the colour scheme of the first board over the second.

Because of that for my 3rd board I decided to change the format of everything, after that was complete I looked at all three of the designs for a very long time to decide which one to transfer to my actual skateboard.

At the end I choose design #1. I choose this design because I liked the checkers on the bottom half and especially liked them in the black colour. Also, I liked the light grey background of the crescent and star with the arch at the bottom. Lastly, the red lines on the top gave the board a very bold look to it.

The first step in preparing the board was to line tape around the edges of the board, I layered two layers just in case the first layer does not hold the paint out. For my tape I lined it right at the edge and almost none of it touched the straight edge of the board where I was about to paint because my stencil has many areas where they touch the edge, therefore if I had put the tape on there my stencil would not cover the whole length of the board.

After that I started first on the checkered part, I lined the bottom half of the board with tape to make the checkers to paint on, only later to realize it would not work. I tested the tape on a brown piece of paper just to make sure and this is the result I got:

Therefore, I had to stencil my checkers which took a tedious amount of time.

Next, I decided to use stencils to make the red bold line on the top of my skateboard along with the light green one. I originally started out with stenciling which did take a long time, but Ms. Cockburn suggested I use the tape. After testing the tape I found that after using a ruler I was able to get the same effect as stenciling. I then went ahead and used the tape method.

After that, I did the crescent and the star, what I did was look on the Internet for a crescent and star beside each other and printed it out, I then used a sharpie to trace it on to the laminating paper, then cut it out and used it to create the negative space of the crescent and star. I placed the two in the right position on the board and used the laminating paper to create an arch below that. Finlay, I filled in the remaining space with light grey.

I got rid of the letters because they were a bit distracting and because I wanted to show some of the natural wood.

While making my skateboard I learned some important things:

if you want solid straight lines use the tape method

if you have lines with curves it's better to use stencils

while cutting the laminating paper cut slowly with your knife because it can easily travel in the opposite direction with the slightest pressure or turn of angle

don't put huge blotches of paint on at once, go slowly and build your board up

you can easily sand of paint that is in unwanted areas

the sponge should not have too much paint on it while applying it to your board, you should dab it in places on your paint board before applying

In my skateboard my focal point would be the empty space in the middle of the board that is where the eye rests and all the designs travel from that point. I used squares, arches, straight lines, stars, and a crescent in my design.

Also, I used different colours in my skateboard:

light green
light grey

black

green

natural colour of the wood

Overall, i am extremely pleased with the skateboard that i have hand-made it is the first hand-made product I have produced and although I probably won't be putting wheels on it I will still be hanging it somewhere that will show it is of great importance to me.