OLF Skateboarding
July 2021
What is your name and where do you live?
Philipp Schellig, I live in a small village near Munich
How long have been drawing skateboard sketches and why?
Ever since I started school, I had the bad habit of vandalising my textbooks with sketches. From cartoon characters to caricatures of my fellow students and teachers, I just doodled everything that came to mind. In April 2020, during the first lockdown, I studied for my final exams of high school. During that time I also decided to pick up skateboarding again, after a long break. So naturally I doodled a small character popping an ollie into my textbook, exclaiming: “Doing an ollie, makes me jolly!”.
Usually, I don’t share my artwork online, but this one kind of grew on me, so I decided to post a finished single-panel comic of the sketch on reddit. People on there encouraged me to draw more comics in this style and suggested to post them on Instagram. I followed this advice and received a bigger following than I would have ever imagined. Someone even got a tattoo of one of my comics, which is my proudest achievement yet (well, being featured in this magazine may be giving the tattoo a run for its money!).
Where do you get the inspiration from?
All my drawings are inspired by pop culture, Saturday-morning cartoons, comics, movies, you name it. Essentially everything you would find on a deck graphic. For my OLF comics specifically I just take inspiration from everything skateboarding, mostly relatable situations every skater eventually encounters during their time on a board really. In terms of other artists, Ben Jensen (waybad) is a big inspiration for OLF comics.
What does skateboarding mean to you?
For me, skateboarding is all about freedom and creativity. For some it’s cruising around with their board, forgetting about everything else for a moment, for others it’s about pushing their limits and improving their performance as a skater, but in the end, it’s just about having a great time.
If there is one thing you could change about skateboarding, what would it be?
I would love to see skateboarding becoming more creative again. I feel like a big portion of today’s skaters just follow trends and don’t think outside of the box. Watching skaters like Jason Park, Richie Jackson, or the Osaka Daggers just is really refreshing. Of course, there are a lot of other creative skaters out there, but they don’t get the attention they deserve in my opinion. Also, I’d love to see less gatekeeping and sense of elitism among the skate community.
