I Custom Painted my First Skateboard Deck

I might not know how to skateboard, but I didn’t let that stop me from custom painting my first skateboard deck!

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After years of mostly painting on canvas, I’m really trying to step outside my comfort zone by painting on new surfaces and using new art mediums.

I've been trying to find ways to create art out of items that can be used and appreciated and not solely hung on a wall. With that in mind, I thought custom painting a skateboard deck would be a good compromise since it can be hung as art or attached to some wheels and taken for a spin.

Now… I don't know how to skateboard. Like, at all. Despite that, I thought it would be fun to paint a skateboard deck for this video.

Prepping the Skateboard Deck for Painting

Once the blank board arrived, the first thing I needed to do was prep it for painting. The skateboard arrived with a glossy coating that I wanted to remove to allow the paint to adhere better. So, step one was sanding.

blank skateboard deck before custom painting

I did a round of sanding, felt pretty good about it, and even taped up the edges and applied a coat of paint... only to realize I kind of did a terrible job sanding. I ended up leaving behind some visible ridges so I went back to square one and re-sanded the skateboard deck.

Creating the Concept Art for the Skateboard Deck

For some reason, the first thing that came to mind when deciding what to paint on this skateboard deck was a fish. Pretty random… I know.

So to get started, I chose colors in the teal family for the background water design and created a faint gradient to add a little more oomph to the background without distracting from the main design.

I wanted the fish to span the entire skateboard and not just the space between where the wheel plates would go. With that in mind, I still had to be careful to design it in a way that if wheels were to be attached in the future, they wouldn't cover up anything crucial.

What kind of paint do you use on a skateboard?

I laid out the initial design with regular ol’ latex paint. Yep, just your basic house paint.

I often buy sample-size paints from Home Depot for projects, especially when painting on wood. You get a lot more paint for your dollar and it’s much more fluid than acrylic paint— making for easy spreading.

Once the initial paint layer was done I went back in with Posca paint markers to layer in some additional color and add the smaller details like the scales and outlining.

Final Thoughts…

Honestly, my favorite part of painting this skateboard deck was probably painting the bubbles. I’m pretty happy with how the board came out as a whole, but it really popped for me when the bubbles went in. Finished it off with a coat of varnish. And voila!