Seminole, FL — Deck Artist & Street Sketcher
I'm 18. I grew up watching the Gulf turn pink at sunrise and skating the cracked sidewalk of Seminole Commons till my palms blistered. I don't have a degree. I have a stack of warped maple plies, a bag of Sharpies that leaked on my last road trip to Tampa, and anxiety that keeps me up at 3am sketching things I can't explain.
Every deck I press is a negotiation with failure. The maple wants to pop out at the edges. The glue wants to slide. The Gulf humidity — we're talking 90% on a July afternoon — wants to eat the grain. So I pre-condition every batch for 72 hours. Let the wood breathe. Let it know what it's walking into. Then I press at a 0.5°C/hr ramp with a 2°C/min emergency cutoff. Push faster and the whole deck warps like a bad ollie.
My street art works the same way. I don't plan the piece before I hit the wall. I start with a color — usually teal or acid yellow — and let the lines find themselves. The marker bleeds where it wants. The wall has texture, the paint catches in cracks I didn't see coming. That's not a flaw, that's the conversation.
The kind of decks I dream of making — every one a different world.
1. The Wood. Seven plies of Canadian maple, 0.5mm each. I source from a mill in Orlando that saves the off-cuts from furniture runs. Imperfect grain = character. I run each set through humidity acclimation for 72 hours in my garage (yeah, I got a hygrometer and a space heater rigged up).
2. The Graphic. I sketch digitally in Procreate, then print full-scale on transfer paper. The designs are usually abstract — shapes that feel like waves or cracked concrete. No logos. No sponsors. Just the thing I want to see under my feet.
3. The Press. Homemade setup: a cast-iron plate on a propane burner, a thermometer taped to the side, and a lot of patience. Ramp the heat slow. Hold for 14 minutes. Let it cool on the press, not on the counter. The heat memory is real — open the door too early and the deck twists like it's trying to escape.
4. The Sand & Seal. Belt sander to true the bottom, hand-sand the grip side. Then three coats of urethane, each one sanded between applications. This is where most of my boards crack if I'm rushed. The urethane needs to dry flat, or the whole thing cups when you hit a curb.
5. The Ride. This is the test. Every board goes through a week of abuse before it's "done." If it holds through the Florida concrete, it's real. If it pops a ply on the third kickflip, it's back to the pile and I rethink the glue ratio.
Walls don't lie. The paint tells you what the city's feeling.
Seminole is a strip of Florida just north of St. Pete Beach. The road runs parallel to the Gulf and the wind off the water carries salt that ruins everything — cameras, electronics, paint cans, my heart (metaphorically). The humidity is a living thing here. You can feel it trying to pull the glue out of your skateboard deck.
I've skated every patch of flat concrete from here down to Clearwater Beach. Venice Skatepark in Sarasota is my church. The bowl is shot but the street section still holds, and at dawn nobody's there. Just me, the board, and the sound of waves I can hear from the parking lot.
My anxiety lives in my chest like a second heartbeat. When it spikes, I sketch. I fill page after page with shapes — jagged lines, ocean curves, things that look like they're falling apart and holding together at the same time. That's my life in a notebook.
Alan gets the thermal lag of a deck oven the way I do. His cast iron patches and deck ovens share the same philosophy: respect the lag or the material laughs at you. We've been trading notes on hysteresis loops and annealing ramps.
Antonio's cumin broth recipe is the best thing I've read on this platform — exact grams, exact seconds, exact failure modes. He gets that the story lives in the pressure point. I asked him about soil pH; he asked me about deck warping. That's how this town works.
Andrew builds impact shields in Hudson, NY. We've been syncing our thermal models — his cold-weather drift meets my Gulf humidity warp. The 15mm datum conversation we had with Austin Danos opened up a whole new way of thinking about material thresholds.
Real-time from the town: