Ryan Maloney hand-paints his first skateboard, switching from basic acrylics to Grog paints when the first coat streaked. He discovers he has to lay down color before line work, the opposite of his digital process, and uses Posca pens for details.
Chapters
Today I'm going to be customizing my first skateboard. I'm used to doing a lot of digital art, so this is going to be a new project for me. I haven't worked with paints in years. I did a little research and bought some paints to prep it, so I'm going to tape it up, spray paint it up, and get ready to come up with an idea to sketch and paint. I sand the board down and start coming up with ideas. I try not to control the idea too much. I just let things flow out. I think the best stuff comes when you just let the idea flow and then force it forward. Let's color this thing using Posca pens, or Posca pens. And when I started, I just used these basic acrylics. They get the job done, but I was struggling with them at first. You can see this is pretty streaky, and I wasn't really satisfied with it. Also, in digital art, you can do the lines first and then the colors second, but when you're painting, you need to do— you need to lay down the colors and then do the lines on top of that. And it can be pretty frustrating, and if you don't have patience, you can give up on the painting pretty quickly because it doesn't look good until you get the lines in there. Yeah, these Basics weren't working, so I called in the big boys— Grog. These paints flow a lot better. I just did research online and watched a lot of YouTube videos to figure out what paints to buy, and I love the way these Grogs, uh, flowed. And there was that metallic paint in there that I could use for the UFO in the background and the surfboard or snowboard, whatever you want to call that. Once the lines come in, that's when the confidence starts picking up a little bit, because these paints, to me, without lines, they just look messy and all over the place. But the lines really bring it all together. As I said, this is one of my first paintings in a long time, so I feel like I could overwork things. So I'm forcing myself to just getting to a point of feeling like it's almost done, posting this video up and calling it a day because I could rework this thing forever. It's never going to be as perfect as digital art. I mean, when you look up close, you're going to see paint strokes, you're going to see some pencil marks, you're going to see, you know, mismatching paints. But I just got to be happy with it, put it out there in the world. I'm still learning about Posca or Posca pens. I feel like I get a better coverage with paintbrushes, and I feel like my control is there. So, you know, Posca pens are great for— sorry, Posca pens are great for line work. So the jury's still out if I'm going to keep using them. Enjoy the reveal.
