Rick Howard

This deck is part of a five-deck series called Contour Curves and released in 2022 by Girl Skateboards. It’s the first board graphics that Skylar Blum, art director at Girl Skateboards at the time, did when he joined the company, as he said in our interview: “It was one of my first ideas when I started at Girl, it just popped in my head”. Contour Curves is inspired by the Blue Nudes, a series of collages and lithographs made by Henri Matisse, French artist, in 1952, from paper cut-outs depicting nude figures in various positions. Skylar Blum explained to us the creative process of it: “I did Rick Howard [board] first, I think it was pretty much exactly what his graphic is now. It felt like some of the older 90’s graphics, with the text fitting into the shape of the board. So, Rick [Howard] asked me to make a few more and see what I’d come up with. Then one day, I went home and made all of them in a day. I was trying to figure out cool different ways that a figure could be contorted into the shape of a skateboard. So, I probably made twenty different poses, then picked my favorite ones and went through a lot of different color options with the team.”