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In addition to being an accomplished painter, surfer Kem McNair takes action photos of other surfers. One of the images he shot went viral online and attracted a surge of traffic to the website through which he sells his paintings and prints.

Kem McNair started surfing when he was a child, and is so passionate about the sport and the surfing culture that he has built his career around it. He has won regional and East Coast championships, surfed and photographed waves in exotic locations all over the world, and worked in a surfboard manufacturing plant.

Since he began painting surfboards in the mid-60s, he has airbrushed and hand-painted over 10,000 surfboards and created thousands of surfing-related T-shirt designs and illustrations. Recently, some of his watercolor and oil paintings were accepted for inclusion in a regional juried art show. Plus, he shoots photographs of local surfers—primarily in the inlet where he continues to surf as often as possible.

Kem McNair combined his experience in surfboard manufacturing with an inkjet-printed reproduction of his “Rainbow Tube” painting to create this 2/3-scale replica of a classic 9 ft. longboard. This Surf Artboard was created for a surfing enthusiast in Colorado.

STEPS 1 and 2: After the board was shaped on a shaping machine, McNair printed out his image file on 3P Universal Light inkjet-printable fabric from LexJet. He signed and numbered the print before it was laminated to the deck of the surfboard with polyester resin.

STEP 3 ABOVE: The edges of the trimmed fabric were concealed with a line of tape before the board was glassed top and bottom with fiberglass cloth and the polyester resin. STEP 4 BELOW: A second coat of resin was applied, then sanded and polished. “The finished board looks like a fine piece of furniture,” says McNair.He notes that the 3P Universal Light fabric still displays a subtle bit of tooth that makes the finished art look more like a painting than a print.

The first Surf Artboards McNair produced were hand-painted, 42-in. miniature surfboards that were time-consuming and expensive to produce. But thanks to the wide-format Epson Stylus Pro 7600 inkjet printer he uses and the 3P Universal Light inkjet-receptive polyester fabric that he purchased from LexJet, McNair has discovered that he can scale up the size of each Surf Artboard while keeping the selling price affordable enough for many surfing enthusiasts. Now, he can make the Artboards in whatever size a client might want.

For a client in Colorado, he recently custom-made a longboard decorated with a reproduction of his “Rainbow Tube” painting. At 6 ft., 6 in. long, this Surf Artboard is 2/3 the size of a real longboard and packs a more powerful visual punch than the 42-in. miniature surfboards.

“What made the whole thing work was the fabric I bought from LexJet,” says McNair. Not only was the fabric more durable than some of the inkjet art and rice papers he had previously tried with his ArtBoards, but “The colors were insanely great!” On the 3P inkjet fabric, the colors didn’t look muted or subdued as they had on some of the inkjet papers that McNair had tried.

Plus, the polyester material held together nicely when the resins were squeegeed on top of the print. Nor did the inks on the 3P fabric run as they had on some of the art papers.

According to McNair, inkjet printing the art is much less laborious than previous processes used to customize surfboards. For example, he recalls when surfboard decals were created by screen-printing inks one color at a time onto rice paper.

Custom-imaged ArtBoards are just one example of the type of innovative, custom products that you can create with some of the dozens of different inkjet-printable materials available from LexJet. Just call your account specialist, describe the type of process you have in mind, and we would be happy to recommend some options.

See more of McNair’s artwork by visiting his online gallery at www.kemmcnair.com

When you visit Kem McNair’s website, be sure to check out his famous “shark jumping the waves” photograph that went viral online and was featured on CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, Inside Edition, and many other media outlets. Some skeptical bloggers speculated that the shark-jumping image was a clever bit of Photoshop trickery. But McNair insists he just happened to be taking action shots of some surfers when he captured a natural phenomenon that he and his fellow surfers at New Smyrna Beach see more often than they might like.