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INTERVIEW WITH MARC
MCKEE
What was the
concept behind this particular board design, and whose was it?
This was one of Daewon Song's earliest graphics. It came out a year or
so after he turned pro for World Industries. The concept was basically
to contrast the school kids with the older gang bangers. The crossing
guard kind of fills the role of the "responsible adult" who weakly
holds up the stop sign. He gets the lowriders to stop, but only so they
can pass a joint from car to car. I realized later that crossing guards
are supposed to stop in the center of the street until all of the kids
have crossed, so that's one inaccuracy about this graphic that kind of
bothers me.
Whose tags are
those on the sign?
The larger "REEM ONE" in the center of the sign was Kareem Campbell's
tag, and the "SECS" tag on the pencil drawing was Tim Gavin's.
How many
graphics do you think you did in 1994 [the year that this one came out]?
Probably about 10. That was when I was more into working on the skate
magazine we had at the time, Big Brother, so I kind of split my time
between doing that and working on graphics. Also the graphic process
was much more drawn out because of the stone age methods we used.
How has the
process of designing skateboards changed for you since the era that you
produced this one?
Uhh, this is probably going to sound like one of those stories your
grandparents tell you about how they had to walk 5 miles to school
every day in the snow uphill both ways, but making skateboard graphics
really used to be a much more tedious process. Things would generally
start the same way, with a rough sketch to get the concept down on
paper. That hasn't changed much. But from that point everything can now
be executed much faster because of the computer. For example now if I
need a photo reference of anything like a car or whatever I can just
Google it and get the exact make and model. Before the internet we
would spend a lot of time at the fucking library or like driving all
over to different newsstands. And no digital cameras either. We used to
have to shoot polaroids. I recall actually asking a crossing guard if I
could take her photo as a reference for this graphic, and got turned
down. I probably could have shot the photo anyway, but I guess it
wasn't hard to remember what a fluorescent vest looked like after I saw
it.
Can you
explain the old process? It seems like it would take a lot more work...
the colorizing and all of that.
Yeah, the color was done with actual markers on a photocopy of the
graphic. If you wanted to change the color in any part of the color
comp you literally had to cut and paste--cut a piece of a new photocopy
and tape it into place on the back. The main reason the coloring
process took longer though was because of how the graphics were
silk-screened directly onto the boards. In silkscreen printing each
color is applied separately. This means you have to isolate each color
on a separate piece of film to make the silkscreen from, and also
figure out the order the colors are applied, since they mix differently
depending on what color goes over another. This involved using this
stuff called rubylith, which was this light-proof red film on clear
plastic that you would incise with an X-acto knife (a razor blade),
cutting just the deep enough to cut the red peel-away part and not all
the way through the clear plastic. Then after the cuts were made you
would peel away the red film so that only the areas where you wanted
the color to go would remain, and you wouldn't know for sure if you
messed up until you were all done and a sample deck was printed.
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