A pair of custom designed longboard decks for the Dstreet skate brand. These boards were used in several exhibitions and sales meetings we had at our company.

 

Designs were drawn up first in pen and pencil, then burnt onto the boards by hand.

The Dstreet brand itself has quite an organic almost nomadic feel to it, it's based on the idea of carving down mountain roads on our boards through the forests and mountains, so I decided to go with two iconic images of nature, being the stag and raven.

As you can seem, everything was drawn up by hand on layout paper. Layout paper has a nice informality to it which doesn't stress me out when im working on a design. 90% of the time all of my work starts out and ends up being drawn on this type of paper.

Kept the design minimal as I was only going to be working in one colour effectively. It was important to make sure the logo blended into the deck design as fluidly as possible.

Good old sharpie pens :)

Here was my first learning curve. I drew the design directly onto the varnished underside of the board, and once I began burning the image onto the deck, I realised the varnish was melting and causing a dirty burnt outline around the burn marks I was making in the wood.

 

So...after drawing the whole design onto the board from the original illustration, I had to sand the whole thing down and start again. I think it's an important problem to face in the long run.

 

Preperation is important and you need to be willing to go back a couple of stages if you make a mistake instead of convincing yourself that everything will be ok or you can work around the problem, as in the long run you end up ruining the work and wasting even more time.

Board was sanded down by hand until the sheen of the varnish was removed, there were stil oils from the wood that seeped through during the burning process, but if anything this added to the texture and raw feel of it.

Close up detail.

The second deck design was two ravens facing each other. If anything the trickiest part of this whole project was transfering the illustrations by hand onto the deck. We didnt have the time or facilities to transfer or burn the design onto the board through laser burning or something similar.

 

I also feel it's good practice to duplicate by hand, it's good training for your hand and eye coordination, it teaches you to consider working in limited spaces and keep an eye on your composition. It's not easy to do, and there's no option of pressing 'Control-Z' when you make a mistake, you just have to keep doing it and re doing it until it's correct.

Both boards finished!! (finally)

The boards were handed over to our New Product design team who added the trucks, and we had some help having the boards mounted too. They were given a quick coat of teak oil which helped to enrich the colours and give it a darker hue. The other sides of the boards were also grip-taped to given a really authentic longboard look.

I'm so happy with the finished product! it was difficult and tricky at times, and a lot of the time I worked on them at the warehouse in our offices so as the smoke wouldnt set off the fire alarms in our office, so it was pretty cold and drafty too; but it was so much fun too. It was something different and new for our brand, and the managers of the Dstreet brand were really happy with the end result, and this is always what you aim for in any design project.

 

Thank you for taking the time to view my work, would love to hear your feedback!