The first in a series of hand painted studies from Matt Box that aim to psychedelically capture the individual styles of influential skateboarders
We catch up with Matt to find out more about 'Acid Drops' - Episode 1 - Matt Dill
Computer Arts: What inspired you to do the hand painted studies?
Matt Box: After a pretty stressful final year of uni I relaxed for a few weeks over summer, spending alot of my spare time painting and skateboarding. I was having a conversation with a friend about why we loved watching old skate videos. We touched upon the fluidity of skateboarding and the importance of style (or 'steez' as it's usually referred) in the sport. I wanted to paint the scenes using a liquid medium to represent the fluidity but it also served to isolate the skater from his environment.This way you can focus on subtle movements and focus on what makes up the individual style of the skater.
CA: Explain your process of turning the paintings into an animation.
MB: The first few paintings were printing out still after still, and then roughly tracing and painting using a lamp as a lightbox. I did a few test animations before experimenting with changing the colours. That's when I came up with the name for the project, 'Acid drops' , which is a pretty basic skateboarding trick that I always thought had a pretty rad name and pushed me to make the animation more psychedelic. I then created a make-shift light box from an old computer monitor. This saved on paper and streamlined the process a lot more. It's a really old and basic form of animation called rotoscoping, but I think applying it to a subcultural sport like skateboarding has given it a new twist.
CA: How long did the project take?
MB: The first animation took about a month to complete. There was a solid week of animating every night until the early hours to get it finished, and the other weeks were ironing out faults, finding music and editing it to fit.
Get the Creative Bloq Newsletter
Daily design news, reviews, how-tos and more, as picked by the editors.
CA: How would you describe your illustrative style?
MB: In this project it's kind of sloppy, I wanted it to look wet to reflect the project name and make the most of the medium. My favourite stills from the animations come when the colours really bleed into each other.
Matt Box is a recent graphic design graduate of Nottingham Trent and is currently hunting for internships and freelance jobs. You can find out more about him here
Thank you for reading 5 articles this month* Join now for unlimited access
