Meet the Unlikely Artist Behind Some of the Coolest Skate Decks on the Planet

After I meet Chiharu Sei at a espresso store in Bushwick, nothing about her attire means that she’s one of many skate world’s most in-demand artists. She’s lined in designer clothes from head to toe, to begin—Louis Vuitton watch and scarf, matching sneakers, YSL bag. The one trace that she’s deep into skate tradition is the Fucking Superior T-shirt hidden beneath her Prada jacket. “It was a present from Fucking Superior,” she tells me, dropping the skate model’s identify casually. Fucking Superior, after all, is a giant deal in its world: it is the buzzy skate and clothing label headed by Jason Dill, with whom Sei has shaped a detailed and unlikely friendship.

It’s nighttime, however Sei insists on ordering a espresso—she’s jetlagged after an LA journey, having spent the previous couple of days hanging out with Dill and portray his portrait for a brand new deck. “Jason is like nobody you’ve ever met earlier than,” she says. “He makes such distinctive expressions, and it makes drawing him the extra fulfilling.” she tells me. This was Sei’s second time portray Dill, however that she’s on this place in any respect continues to be one thing of a shock.

Three years in the past, Dill and Sei had been launched by her supervisor on the Louis Vuitton retailer in New York’s Soho. On the time, Dill was searching for his subsequent luxurious purchase. Sei was working as a gross sales affiliate, however working her means towards changing into a regional artisan—somebody who does customized work on the model’s hard-sided baggage. Sei acknowledged Dill instantly. “I bear in mind seeing him in a lookbook at Supreme and considering to myself, ‘That man has such an attention-grabbing model,’” she tells me. She had determined to sketch a drawing of Dill on her telephone on the time—after which, when he got here into the shop, she labored up the nerve to indicate it to him.

Dill should have preferred what he noticed, as a result of, a couple of days after the encounter, he reached out to Sei with a activity: he needed her to design a board for Supreme skater Sean Pablo. Just a few months later, Sei’s Ex Machina-inspired sketch of the skater was printed onto decks and bought via Fucking Superior, an enormous co-sign from the skate world for an artist. The product carried out so nicely that Dill employed her once more: first to sketch a design for 2018 Thrasher Skater of the Year Tyshawn Jones, after which to color a design of Dill himself. “I actually love how Chiharu’s artwork works so nicely with FA and what we do,” Dill tells me over the telephone. “The professional mannequin graphics she’s performed for us are completely beautiful.” Sei describes her work as bridging the graphic and life like, however the delicacy and intricacy of her composition units her model aside.

Once we meet, I comment that she’s been fortunate to get such a giant break, however she cuts me off and jogs my memory of the years of preparation that led her right here. Sei doesn’t consider in luck a lot as timing. “If you happen to do not put together, you’ll by no means get it. I believe you put together after which a possibility comes after which meets it on the proper place,” she says.