For artist Hannah Eddy, every day blends deep work and deep play. Clad in her favorite pair of Dickies Carpenter Pants, Eddy loads her mountain bike into the back of her bright red 1988 Toyota truck. Her destination: Sierra Vista Bike Park. She just needs to swing by her downtown Reno art studio for 4-5 concentrated hours of painting first. “I’ve found that if I’m really intentional and stay focused while I’m working, it always opens up time to do the outdoor activities that I love,” Eddy says. Luckily, her Dickies transition seamlessly from studio to bike park.
Art and outdoor sports have always gone hand-in-hand in Eddy’s life. After getting her first skateboard at age five, Eddy started sketching ideas for board art. She’s been using skateboards and other sporting equipment as art canvases ever since.
Crafting a Creative Career
Like many creatives, Eddy didn’t have a clear path to where she is today. But she always knew what she liked: art and board sports. As a teen, Eddy frequented Sunny Breeze, the local skate and snowboard shop, to soak in the counterculture vibe. That experience led her to the University of Colorado Boulder, where she majored in art and competed on the university snowboard team. During the summers, she worked at High Cascade Summer Snowboard Camp on glacier-covered Mount Hood, where she met her now-husband—pro-snowboarder Tim Eddy. A shared love of snowboarding brought the couple to Lake Tahoe, where Tim had grown up and where they could pursue their passions for mountain sports. When she wasn’t snowboarding or working her day job as a pastry chef, Eddy continued to pour time into her art, creating sketches inspired by her new Sierra Nevada home.
Eddy’s break in the industry came through a connection from High Cascade Summer Snowboard Camp. Now a marketing director at Dakine, this former co-worker followed Eddy’s art and reached out about featuring her sketches on Dakine backpacks, apparel, and accessories—all made from recycled plastic bottles. The “Do Radical” collection would become Eddy’s first major brand collaboration.
Working with Dakine opened Eddy’s eyes to the opportunities available to a full-time artist with her skillset. “Once I kind of put it out into the universe that I was an artist, that’s when things really started happening,” Eddy says.
“With a lot of my art I just want to create a feeling of connection, and that we’re all in this together, when you’re out in nature, once you tap in and you’re flowing and you’re present, you become aware of how connected it all is.”
Hannah eddy
Pop-Surrealism and the Outdoors
Today, Eddy works at the intersection of art and what she calls “flow sports”—mountain biking, skateboarding, and snowboarding. Her pop-surrealist graphics adorn skateboards, snowboard boots, water bottles, helmets, goggle straps, t-shirts, sweatshirts, stickers, watches, and wallets. And she partners with some of the most recognizable brands in the outdoor industry, including Vans and Protect Our Winters.
Her latest collaboration: a collection with Santa Cruz Skateboards and Skate Like a Girl—a non-profit with a mission to make skateboarding more inclusive for all. “This was a dream project for me,” Eddy says. “Jim Phillips is the original artist for Santa Cruz and was a huge inspiration to me as a kid. They’re like the OGs of combining amazing art with skate decks.”
SHOP THE DICKIES CARPENTER PANTS
Eddy creates most of her art in her second-floor studio through Sierra Water Gardens, a Bohemian-style plant shop that she calls an “urban oasis.” But spending time outside—where she dreams up new nature-inspired designs—is equally important to her creative process. “With a lot of my art, I just want to create a feeling of connection, and that we’re all in this together,” Eddy says. “When you’re out in nature, once you tap in and you’re flowing and you’re present, you become aware of how connected it all is,” she says.
This post was sponsored by Dickies.
