By Hali Estrada.
It’s been more than 20 years since Choncordia started as a group of kids having fun with our Skateboards, unbeknownst to us Skateboarding was going to be in our lives forever and needless to say we fell in love with our “useless wooden toys”. My very first board was a fiber glass board with no graphics at all but that changed the day my brother and I sold our bikes (without our parents’ permission) to buy our first complete Skateboard. I remember that it had a drawing of a Skeleton doing a handplant on a gravestone, the board wasn’t a Powell or a Santa Cruz and the quality was horrible but it was our introduction to Skateboard graphics and I became obsessed with the colors and the images that went from just simple logos to highly detailed illustrations of monsters, cartoon characters and skulls.
From V. Courtlandt Johnson, Jim Phillips and Francesco Albertini to Natas, Andy Howell, Marc Mckee, Andy Jenkins, Sean Cliver, Evan Hecox and many others, they defined what Skateboard graphics were and ultimately what they are now; the late 80’s and the 90’s were the most inspirational time of my life.
My school books and my bedroom walls were soon filled with drawings and I started doing the first sketches for Choncordia. It was the beginning and I’ve done a lot of drawings since then but to this day I don’t consider myself an Artist like the masters I mentioned before and when people ask me about the meaning of my drawings I really don’t know what to say. I just do stuff that comes to my mind; sometimes they mean something but most of the time with no “deep” meaning at all. Trying to explain myself or looking for an explanation after the drawing is done takes the fun out of it. I did the Bottle graphic for the Anniversary board in 2008; we couldn’t release the boards at that time but now it’s finally available at the store in 3 color combos and we are going to release 4 more series this year starting this Friday so come back for the update. The Anniversary board is 100% Made in USA and is going to be very limited in production ( only 30 on each color ) so click on the pic to go to the store. :)
Somebody is probably going to ask me about the graphic and why I did it for the Anniversary board. You are welcome to look for the deeper secret meaning of the open bottle or the colors, but the truth is there isn’t one; I just think it looks cool :). CFL.
