The aesthetics of a board are a very personal thing. Some folks enjoy the simplicity of a plain white board, others feel the need to see bananas in all things.
While I have tried to make my boards look like bananas, I’ve always wanted to do a little more with the art on a board so for the X6 I’m opening up a new chapter in board art for The Banana Peel Board Company. For reasons I’ll explain in a future post, I want to go with a bomb theme.
There are many ways to dress up a board. You could tint the resin, you can paint the foam, you can print a graphic and glass that onto the board. What I’m enjoying for now is airbrushing the foam directly.
Before I begin, I’ll be transferring my board from my shed to my garage. This is where my glassing racks are so the first thing I’m going to do is to make sure my racks are level. To adjust the level of the rack, wrap masking tape around the end.
Next I’ll mask off the stringer and lay down a base coat of block out white paint. This covers up most of the marks on the board and gets it ready to show the colors of the other paints.
Halfway to show the difference 
Looks good, glass it!
Now it’s a matter of letting your imagination go wild … one color at a time. I use acrylic paint and an air brush. I love my air brush, I’m using the Paasche H Series brush. It’s a single action brush which means it’s pretty much just on or off which is good for budding artistes such as myself.
This is the point in life where you discover that not all masking tape is created equal.
Ok, so it’s more of a rocket than a bomb. Acrylic paint dries pretty fast, so you usually don’t have to wait long before going from one part of the board to the next.
Give it a couple of hours to dry then you can flip it over and do the deck. The blue border was an idea I had while in flight with this paint job. I like how it made the rocket feel like it was flying so I decided to do the same with a banana (old habits are hard to break) on the deck.
And finally…The Flying Banana…
