Art Decks
Skateboard Deck Art
Original oil-sketch paintings of the seven archangels, printed onto seven-ply Canadian maple and applied by hand in Denver, Colorado. Built to be skated. Good enough to hang.
The Collection
See every graphic in the full deck gallery.
Seven-Ply Canadian Maple
Cold-pressed hard rock maple — the same construction used by every serious deck manufacturer. Standard concave, medium kick, 8.0 inch width. These are not display-only replicas.
Digital Heat Transfer
Screen printing flattens detail to a handful of spot colours. Heat transfer holds the full tonal range of an oil painting — the shadow gradients, the gold leaf, the cracked-varnish texture.
Printed in Denver
Applied one board at a time rather than run off in bulk. Slight variation between decks is a consequence of the process, not a defect.
Why Baroque?
Skateboard graphics have always borrowed from religious iconography — Powell Peralta's skulls, Santa Cruz's screaming hand, the endless crucifixes and flaming hearts of nineties board art. The borrowing is usually ironic.
Archangel Skate takes it straight. The source material is Baroque devotional painting: Caravaggio's hard-edged chiaroscuro, Guido Reni's Michael standing over the defeated adversary, the gold-ground altarpieces of the Counter-Reformation. These were images built to stop a person in a doorway.
A skateboard is one of the few objects left that a person carries in public, drops on concrete, wears down, and eventually retires to a wall. That arc — use, damage, reverence — is the same arc a devotional object travels. The deck is a reasonable place to put a saint.
Common Questions
What makes an art skateboard deck different from a regular deck?+
The construction is identical — seven-ply Canadian maple, standard concave, full pop. The difference is the graphic. An art deck treats the underside as a canvas rather than a logo placement, so the artwork is designed to be looked at as a piece in its own right.
Can you actually skate an art deck?+
Yes. Every Archangel deck is a fully rideable board pressed from seven-ply Canadian maple. The graphic wears down as you skate it — many people consider that part of the appeal, and others buy a second deck to hang.
How is the artwork applied?+
Each graphic is digitally printed and applied by hand using a Digital Heat Transfer process in Denver, Colorado. Because it is applied individually rather than mass screen-printed, no two decks are exactly alike.
What size are the decks?+
Our decks are 8.0 inch width, the most widely used size for street and park skating, and compatible with standard trucks and hardware.
Hanging one instead of skating it? See skate deck wall art. Setting one up to ride? Start with custom griptape. New to mounting? Read how to hang a skateboard on the wall.