I would lie if I said that my first couple of encounters with the skateboard had been a success. I have never used blender before and as the shape of the board was more complicated to the simple design of the snowman I was stuck when it came to the boards basic shape.

When altering using the “insert faces” tool I came into trouble with a square edge/dip, which I kept restarting the board from scratch as it wasn’t as smooth as I had wished (even when applying the smooth setting). I assumed I wasn’t following the steps correctly and kept coming to a dead end when the same issue kept arising.

I didn’t screenshot the issue, but this was an accurate depiction of what kept happening.

How I solved the issue: I believe I was trying to alter the initial shape of the tips/faces too much, hence when moving onto the finer details messed with the form. I retracted a few steps then proceeded without tweaking the tip faces and it came out with a satisfying result.

Yay! No dips!

I didn’t have too much difficulty modelling the wheel, rather than angular squares it had a circular form from the start with a fair number of edges, allowing me to be precise with the shape.

However, duplicating my wheel led to issues as it was attached to the skateboard, and when replacing it wasn’t on its axis.

I had to restart, go back and place the wheel on its axis, unpair (edit mode, “P” and then loose parts) and continue from there on the proper axis. I was delighted with how my previous wheel came out, however it caused difficulty placing the duplicates down the line so this adjustment was crucial. I was then able to create the screw and join that to the wheel to create a single object rather than melding it with the skateboard.

I followed the remaining of the tutorials on blackboard and decided I wanted to attempt to stray away from the original design and implement small hearts. I researched various ways to create the shape of the heart as a flat object and the easiest method to follow was by using a cube and 2 cylinders, forming to one object and assigning colours. I then duplicated and placed the shapes flat against the skateboards surface.

I added a basic plain for the board to rest on and implemented the ambient lighting setting. I tried to set up a sun point to control the light source of my scene however I wasn’t able to get this to trigger through the settings, however I found that the strength of the light needed to be set high to make a stronger impact.

I finished the skateboard and here is my result:

As I’ve never worked with blender before this process didn’t go as smoothly as planned. There was a lot of trial and error, however in doing this practise run I was able to familiarise myself with blender menus and it’s shortcuts.