October 31, 2026

The Surfboard as Canvas: Pinlines, Tints, Airbrush and Surf Art

Polished koa in ancient Hawaii, coloured resin and pinlines in the 1960s, airbrushed sunsets in the 1970s and paint pens today: how surfers turned their boards into art, and the artists who drew surf culture.

Intro

A surfboard is a tool built for one job, but surfers have always made it beautiful too. The colour, lines and artwork of a board are part of its personality, and in surf culture the shaper, the glasser and the artist are often as respected as the riders.

This article follows how surfboards were decorated through the ages, and the artists who gave surf culture its look. As with all our design pieces, we describe the work rather than reproducing it. The sources at the bottom lead to the artists and archives.

Ancient Hawaii: the beauty of the wood

The first surfboards were works of craft in their own right. According to Club of the Waves, ancient Hawaiians shaped boards from koa, wiliwili and ula trees using basalt adzes. They smoothed them with coral and sand, wet-sanded them with sharkskin and finished them with kukui nut oil.

There were two main types:

Olo: long boards, typically 14–16 feet, ridden by chiefs (the ali'i).
Alaia: shorter boards, typically 10–12 feet, ridden by commoners.

Building a board was surrounded by prayer and ritual. The decoration was the board itself: the grain of the wood and a deep, oiled finish.

The fibreglass era: colour you can see through

Modern surfboards, with a foam core wrapped in fibreglass and resin, opened up a new palette. Surfboard glassers developed several ways to add colour, each with its own look.

Technique	How it works	Look
Tint	Concentrated, see-through colour mixed into the resin during lamination	Glowing, translucent colour, often over the whole board or the bottom and rails
Pigment (opaque)	Solid colour mixed into the resin	Bold, flat colour panels
Pinline	A thin stripe brushed in pigmented resin between strips of tape	A sharp line one to two inches inside the rail
Airbrush	Acrylic paint sprayed through a handheld nozzle, usually onto the foam before glassing	Anything from clean fades to wild murals

According to the Encyclopedia of Surfing, pinlines first appeared in the early 1950s and had become an art form by the early 1960s. They were brushed on between the sanding coat and the gloss coat, using pigmented resin laid between carefully placed strips.

Resin tints gave many classic longboards their deep, jewel-like colours. They were applied by hand during lamination, which made each board unique, and mistakes hard to fix.

The airbrush years

By the 1970s, the airbrush had arrived on surfboards. The paint is sprayed onto the foam blank before glassing, or between the sanding and gloss coats, so it ends up sealed under the fibreglass.

The Encyclopedia of Surfing shows examples such as boards airbrushed by Martyn Worthington for the Australian surfer Terry Fitzgerald in 1974. Sunsets, waves, flames and space-age fades became part of the look of 1970s surfing. According to the encyclopedia, airbrushing began to replace tinting in the 1980s, because it was popular and cheaper.

Surf artists who drew the culture

Surfing's look was shaped as much by artists working on paper as by those working on boards.

John Severson

John Severson founded The Surfer, later Surfer magazine, in 1960. He was also an artist. According to Surfer Today, painting and drawing were central to his early life, and he designed posters and made surf films as well. His mix of art, photography and film helped give surfing its first real media identity.

Rick Griffin

Rick Griffin grew up in Palos Verdes, California, and started surfing at 12. In 1961 his cartoon character Murphy, a cheerful young surfer, appeared in Surfer magazine, and the following year Murphy was on the cover.

Griffin went on to become one of the "Big Five" artists of San Francisco's psychedelic poster movement. He designed posters for Bill Graham's Fillmore shows from 1968 and the cover of the Grateful Dead album Aoxomoxoa. He died in 1991 after a motorcycle accident. His path from surf cartoons to psychedelic art shows how closely surf culture and 1960s counterculture were linked.

Jim Phillips

Before he drew the Screaming Hand for Santa Cruz Skateboards, Jim Phillips was a surf artist. According to Surfer Today, his first published work was a surf car cartoon in Surfer Quarterly in 1962, and his early income came from surfboard art. (See our history of skateboard graphics.)

Drew Brophy

In the modern era, Drew Brophy, born in 1971 in South Carolina, is known for painting surfboards with water-based Posca paint pens, a technique he helped pioneer and has taught to many other artists. He began painting boards as a boy and used his art to pay for surf travel, and the commissions turned into a career. He appears in the 2012 book Surf Graphics.

The surfboard today

Today you see every technique side by side:

Classic resin tints and pinlines on hand-shaped longboards and retro fish, where tradition is part of the appeal.
Clean white boards with a logo, the working tool of most shortboarders.
Airbrush and spray for custom colour fades.
Paint pens that anyone can use on a finished board.

And there is a whole world of art boards that are made to hang on a wall rather than to ride: one-off pieces by artists and shapers, sold as art.

If you want to decorate your own board, paint pens on a finished board are the easiest place to start. Tints, pinlines and airbrush are jobs for a professional glasser before the board is glassed.

Timeline

Period	Development
Ancient Hawaii	Koa, wiliwili and ula boards finished with kukui nut oil
Early 1950s	First pinlines on surfboards
1960	John Severson founds The Surfer
1961–62	Rick Griffin's Murphy appears in Surfer, then on its cover
Early 1960s	Pinlines and resin tints become an art form
1970s	Airbrushed boards; Worthington's boards for Terry Fitzgerald (1974)
1980s	Airbrush replaces tinting as the common way to colour a board
2000s–	Paint-pen surfboard art popularised by Drew Brophy and others