The Origin Story

Back in 1990, my parents bought me my first skateboard from the Toys R Us store just down the street from us in Hollywood, FL. It had plastic trucks and plastic wheels, both of which are not that good for the actual act of skateboarding. The “pièce de résistance” was the skate deck itself, which had Bart Simpson’s face plastered over it and was rightly titled the “Official Bart Simpson Vehicle of Destruction”. I rode on it quite a bit, but not as you would imagine. Most of my adventures with the skateboard involved lying face-down on the board and scooting myself across the sidewalk (I was only 6 years old at the time). The only other thing I really remember about the board is that I put a lot of Kid Cuisine stickers all over it, and they were very difficult to remove. My memory fails me after that point.

Flash forward to 1999, and my sophomore year in high school, where a friend of mine re-introduced me to skateboarding. He got me hooked on a mail-order catalog called CCS, which sold everything you could possibly need for a skateboard. Every month, I would sit down with the latest issue and flip through the large variety of skateboard decks from brands such as Element, Enjoi, Blind, and my favorite, Birdhouse (the house that Tony Hawk built). It was during this time that I started to become infatuated with all of the different designs that graced the decks and t-shirts from these companies.

This blog will focus on the art aspect of skateboarding. When people think of skateboard art, they usually only think of the illustration on the bottom of the deck. While this is a large part of it, we’ll also discover that there is much more to this ever growing popular art form.

Off we go…

-Kevin