Indie Spotlight: Lovenskate
HUCK talks to Lovenskate, a London-based skate and screenprinting company that's been getting rad since 2001.
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Located just off Hackney Road in east London, Lovenskate is the kind of place that makes you wish that the Industrial Revolution had never happened.
In the cluttered studio - cluttered mostly by teacups - Stu Smith, a perfectionist and the brains behind the company, shuns modern day printing presses to screenprint skateboard decks and t-shirts by his own fair hand.
Lovenskate began life back in 2001 with Stu self-publishing a fanzine called Lovenskate that was "cut-and-paste-style from skate photos and [...] about stuff that I liked or was excited about." After receiving his training in all things screenprinting from a company called Bilko in south London, Stu set up his own screenprinting venture called Error Solutions, and thus allowing him to raise the cash to slowly grow his own skate brand on the side. Since then, Lovenskate has been making some awesome decks, comedic t-shirts, shot a short skate film called Super Jumbo and now sponsors a small team of skaters too.
But Stu doesn't work alone, the studio is shared between Stu, Lilli, Dan and paper-cut artist extraordinaire, Rob Ryan. Lilli started off doing work experience but after her departure, Stu realised "she was awesome and had to get her back" and now she works as his assistant, and uses the equipment to print her own home furnishings.
As an independent, business is not necessarily lucrative, but they are managing to keep their heads above water. Explains Stu: "It's certainly not easy to keep a skateboard company afloat, and if I'm honest it doesn't make any money at all. It just about pays for itself and is a labour of love for sure. We print for a good few skate shops and other skateboard companies, and have some regular fashion clients and music stuff. That keeps the money coming in to pay for the studio and all the consumables, and the tea!"
Stu and Lilli screenprinting a deck.
Decks! Half finished.
But by staying independent is important and helps them reclaim some ownership of skateboarding in the process. “The big dogs [in the skateboarding industry] are in charge, that is for sure," say Stu. "But printing all this stuff for other smaller skateboard companies, I do see a few changes. We are doing smaller runs of designs and limited stuff. People seem to care more than before that something is considered and time has gone into it – that it hasn't been packed in a box by someone who knows nothing about skateboarding in China or wherever."
Stu does acknowledge, however, that there are ups and downs to running your own business. “The best [part] is the freedom to do your own projects,” he says. “It's a buzz watching things you dreamed about a few years ago actually happening, and realising that you've made it happen through hard work. The worst is when things go wrong. It's your fault if you mess up and you don't get paid. I don't relax much. I have this unhealthy attitude that if I'm not worrying, then things will go wrong. That keeps me on my toes though.”
And for a company who’s underlying ethos is summed up as “a continuous process of living, learning, loving and skating”, what does the future hold? Says Stu: “One day, I am going to have a print shop, with a ramp out the back with some pool coping, and a shop front, selling Lovenskate gear, and the finest skateboard hardware. Tea will come free as standard. I'm going to learn handplants and inverts, and I wanna have enough money to have a foot massage everyday. Maybe I'll get a job in a bar to pay for that!”
A wall full of ideas.
Pictures getting exposed onto the silk screen before printing.
The drying rack.
A mantra for life!
HUCK's quick guide to making an awesome screenprint:
1. Find/design an awesome image. Copyright is at your discretion.
2. Set it to 'greyscale' and manipulate it to hell and back using Photoshop.
3. Print onto funky tracing paper.
4. Paint up a silk screen with water-soluble UV reactive emulsion and leave it to dry.
5. Lay the print on top and expose it to UV light for a set amount of time, depending on how detailed the image is.
6. Anywhere that isn’t blacked out the emulsion will set solid, so once washed, your image will appear on the silkscreen.
7. Make sure your frame is taped down, and ink up with a squeegee!
8. Carefully lift off the screen without swearing.
9. Admire your masterpiece.
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Indie Spotlight: Lovenskate (text) by Liz Seabrook is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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