Stu Smith is sat by a bench-top in the Mangle Studio in Bethnal Green sporting ink-splattered garb, a trucker hat and his trademark winning grin. Redolent of Hollywood actor Ethan Embry and the character Bill from Bill & Ted, Smith runs one of Britain’s last remaining hand screen-printers of skateboards out of this studio. “Almost everyone else uses digital heat transfers,” he says as he gives a tour of his operational facility. Worse still, “They get their prints done by someone else, often someone in China.”
For Smith, who is proud to brandish the humble squeegee and mesh screens of traditional printing, the arduous “pain in the backside” of manual printing is done purely for aesthetic reasons. “Digital prints look cheap and so pixelated that they aren’t really the precious pieces of art that you want to treasure,” he says. But hand-printing graphics onto skateboards is an altogether trickier business than printing posters, t-shirts and stickers, which Smith also does. “Because the skateboard’s got shape to it, you can’t use the same screens as you would for printing t-shirts,” he says. Indeed, it took Smith more or less five years to devise a nearly perfect shape to his screen for boards.
“I’ve had some pretty weird shapes before,” he says gesturing to one that’s enjoying a second life as a shelf supporting ink cans. Testifying to this labour of love, he says, “If I’m printing less than 10 boards a day, I can guarantee that four of them will be a little bit misprinted.”
Smith’s life-long passion for skateboarding – he has “A continuous process of living, learning, loving and skating” etched across his arm – impelled him to found a skateboard apparel brand almost a decade ago called Lovenskate. Smith prints “Lovenskate” graphics onto maple boards imported from the USA and then sells them online as well as to specialised retailers across the UK.
With no pretence of competing with global skateboard behemoths like Blind and Element, Lovenskate is an enterprise propped up solely by a side business screen-printing t-shirts and posters for other companies. By running a small operation that cannot enjoy economies of scale, Smith makes about 50 pence on each skateboard he prints and sells. That’s because he doesn’t want to pass the costs of a small print run onto consumers. On a good year, like the last, he can sell up to 500 boards.
The brand’s graphic designs are done by Smith and a loose crew of skater-illustrators and friends. Designs range from straightforward typography spelling out zingers like “Real men skate curbs”, to photo prints and gnarly vampires and skulls.
When it comes to being old school, Smith isn’t content with simply using squeegees and screens. The way he creates stencils for his prints is also as time-consuming and labour-intensive as you can imagine.
“The secret is Amberlith,” he says referring to a sheet of clear acetate coated with a thin transparent orange film. He demonstrates his modus operandi by firstly fixing a sheet of this acetate to a white piece of paper. The paper has a computer-printed typographical design declaring, “There is seriously too much radness.” He then applies a craft knife to the Amberlith and cuts around the letters of the design. “This enables you to strip away the orange film to reveal the clear acetate, leaving only the letters in orange.” Smith then fixes the resulting cut-out to the back of a mesh screen, which he has previously prepared with a coat of photo emulsion.
He says, “You shine a really bright UV light onto the screen for about seven minutes. Where the light is unable to pass [through the orange bits of the Amberlith] the emulsion remains water-soluble and where it does pass through, the emulsion hardens to form an opaque surface.” After this exposure process, the screen is washed, and, “You’re left with a stencil of pure mesh where the emulsion has washed off.” It is through this pure mesh that ink during the screen-printing process is able to pass through.
There is of course an easier way of creating a stencil that uses the same photographic principles. But it involves using a computer, which Smith tries to avoid if he can help it. To him, the beauty of using Amberlith is the resulting hand-cut quality of the stencil. “I really like the fact that as hard as you try to get the cut perfect, you can never achieve it.” With so much labour going into his designs, isn’t Smith vexed when his boards get roughed up by devil-may-care skateboarders? “Scratching up the design [while skating] is the most beautiful part of it,” he says somewhat mischievously. “There’s romance everywhere.”
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