I’m a new student this semester at OSF and my brand is BYNTRE, which exists to help skate culture respect and take care of their space. With my brand, I hope to encourage skaters to consider how their actions impact the environment and make sure to treat the spaces they use conscientiously. BYNTRE honours the raw materials and the hand-crafted nature of board building. This is an important message to me because I am a big environmentalist and I want others to care about the earth and do their part. I believe small actions inspire change and BYNTRE aims to engage the skate community in making choices that are good for the planet.
I pressed 7 veneers of Canadian maple to create my street deck and cut a custom tape stencil design with the slogan, “Cut bad habits, not trees.” I used natural green and blue tones to connect it to the earth and water. The leaves were originally found in the park from local trees outside the school and then photocopied, traced and stencilled onto the board with spray paint. The placement of the leaves balances the composition, while allowing the raw wood to show through in the text plays with negative space and shows off the original material.
As this was my first board, I did not know what to expect from the process and although it was hard work and time consuming, I am very happy with how it turned out. In the future, I want to include more natural resources in my work and experiment with found materials. Check out more of my work @byntre_skate on Instagram.
