Magic Rainbow Skateboard Swing

Holy Rainbow, I sure had fun painting (or more accurately dipping in paint and then swinging on) this skateboard deck for Bordo Bello. So much fun, in fact, that I had to make a silly little video!

Bordo Bello is a skateboard art fundraiser designed to support AIGA Colorado’s mentorship opportunities.

If you feel like your home or office could do with a skateboard deck turned rainbow turned swing, you can place a bid on ebay over the next 24 hours!

And now, some behind the scene stuffs…

To record the images, I used the iSight camera on an old iMac in combination with the awesome application Gawker. (For me, this required a good deal of help from the patient and wonderful Josh Stewart, but for most humans, it should be self-explanitory.) To edit the images and record the “soundtrack,” I used iMovie.

I filled the box the deck came in with paint and then dipped the skateboard into the paint, layer by rainbow layer.

In between dips, I clamped the board to ropes tied to a 2x4 which I had suspended between two sprinkler pipes at Studiomates. (I know what you’re thinking, and you are correct: this was by NO means structurally sound!) It was going great until the green, which got more than a little messy, I got more than a little stressed, and I had to channel James Victore in order to keep it going.

Finally, all 7 stripes were complete, and the effect was pretty cool. I untied the clamps and used the ropes to fashion a swing from the deck. I actually did a little swinging, until the 2x4 started to crack! (I was alerted to this by Creighton’s frantic yells of, “It’s cracking! IT’S CRACKING!”)

The box ended up as rainbow as the board. It was fun to ship the board back to Colorado in the same box, now fortified with layers of paint.

Thanks to Elysia Syriac, AIGA Colorado’s President, for asking me to participate in this very fun fundraiser! And thanks to Tina for posting the video I made over on Swiss Miss!