Digital to analogue: printing skateboard stickers and mini-prints at the skate park

For Helena, being able to print photos on the spot wasn't just about recording a particular trick, so much as capturing the excitement of a friend's achievement. She tried to choose pictures where you could recognise the person and also identify exactly what trick it was, at least if you knew something about skateboarding.

As well as action shots, Helena printed just as many pictures of people, locations, and things that happened. She gifted prints to friends as mementoes of a special day – and confesses that she usually printed a copy for herself too, so she could also keep the moment close.

Choosing the right composition wasn't always easy. "You want to capture everything – the person, preferably their face, and then also their board," she says. "You don't want to cut off any legs or arms or movements. There's an art to it."

Of course, with the Canon Zoemini 2 and the Canon Mini Print app, you don't have to get the perfect shot in advance in order to get beautiful printed output.

"It's the easiest thing to use ever," Helena explains. "You just install the app on your phone, and it connects to the printer over Bluetooth. You can edit your pictures, crop them, and add squiggles and stamps and silly drawings, plus frames and filters and effects before printing them out. It's also fun watching the app show the progress of the print as it's physically coming out.

"Printing takes less than a minute, and you can use the stickers immediately and just put them anywhere. I stuck them on my skateboard, my bike, my notebook, on the back of my phone case."

The Canon Zoemini 2 is battery-powered, so you can use it anywhere, and it requires no ink cartridges – it uses ink-free ZINK¹ paper and can output 2x3-inch mini-prints or 1.3-inch pre-cut circles, both with peel-and-stick backs. Prints are completely dry as soon as they come out of the printer, and water- and fingerprint-resistant.

"At first, I was kind of scared of smudging my prints, especially if I had slightly dirty hands from skateboarding," Helena confesses. "But it was fine. And you can immediately draw on them."

Helena found the prints she produced with the Canon Zoemini 2 were perfect for creative journaling and scrapbooking. She used felt-tips or paint pens to draw patterns on the page before sticking the prints in, and then also doodled and drew on top of the prints. Pens and even paints won't bleed or ruin the photo.

With her background in illustration, Helena can see so much potential for using the prints. You can have two images on one print, like a collage. She enjoyed using this option to marry together things that happened on the same day or were related to each other, such as a landmark or monument evocative of a location she'd visited alongside something that took place there. "So it brought together a couple of memories of a special day I had.”

In addition to pre-cut circle paper, “you can have different shapes, which I guess you could then cut out – I was thinking I might use them for cards and things like that. The app is really easy to use, and it's got lots of options to create different things.

"I actually had a birthday on the weekend and I made a custom sticker and stuck it on the inside of the card. It's easy to personalise for friends, because you can write messages such as 'Happy Birthday' on it, so it could be a card in itself.

"You can also print out labels, so I can label everything. My partner moved into a new place and had to put their name on the letterbox, so I made a custom sticker with their name. I think it's the coolest little letterbox sticker label of the lot."

"I travel a lot, and I always try to pack light," Helena says. "But at the same time I like to collect things and bring back mementoes. This is such a compact little printer. It just fits in my pocket. It's like portable charger size or almost the size of my phone, so I could really easily take it with me anywhere.

"I really look forward to taking it on skateboarding trips and handing out stickers to friends and keeping a little memory book of travels that I can look back on at some point in the future."

Helena sees a particular value in bringing digital images back into the analogue world. "In both skateboarding and photography, there's an importance in having a physical object. I think so many people now are just online and losing touch with the physical aspect, like holding a book or a magazine or a print, and maybe even having things framed on the wall. I think it's really important to keep things in print.

"Having a little piece of technology that makes it so easy to do so means, hopefully, future generations will still want to collect and create things and keep a little scrapbook going. Stuff like that, so it's not always on a screen."

At her local skate park, Helena showed her friends what she was doing with the Canon Zoemini 2. "Some of them who have kids were like, 'Oh, my daughter would love that!' And I was like, 'I know, I think all of us want it!' It's definitely something for everyone. But I think skateboarding particularly tends to have this giant kid energy – we may be grown up but we just constantly want to play. And this was really fun!"

Ready to make a scrapbook or customise your deck? Explore the pocket-size, zero-ink Canon Zoemini 2 and start bringing your digital shots into the real world, wherever you go.



Written by Alex Summersby