The caps sit heavy and matte, ridged where wet paper dried around a mold, painted in the flat colors of team insignias that never belonged to any actual team. Philip Lindeman built them by hand, layer over layer, the way a kid builds a piñata, except the references underneath are skate graphics and American advertising rather than birthday themes.
Lindeman's day job is editorial illustration, work made on a screen, delivered as a file, published at a resolution someone else chooses. This project runs the opposite direction. It's Nice That covered the release directly, describing a childhood "filled with sports team insignias, logos and graffiti tags" now rebuilt as physical objects you could pick up, turn over, and set down on a shelf.
This is sculpture now, not illustration, and the distinction matters more than it looks. An illustrator moving into three dimensions is not simply extending a practice, it is trading a medium that scales infinitely for one that does not. A digital file can be published a thousand times at no marginal cost. A papier-mâché cap exists once, in one place, and degrades if you're not careful with it. Lindeman's choice to spend time on an object that cannot be resized, re-cropped, or emailed is itself a statement about where he wants the work to live.
Skateboarding has its own long relationship with this kind of object-making, board graphics as folk art, deck shape as sculpture, but Lindeman's caps borrow the vocabulary without the function. They can't be ridden, worn casually, or sold at scale the way a real cap could. They exist as a tribute to the source material, built slow, on purpose, at a size of one.
The mold itself is worth sitting with. Wet paper takes the shape of whatever it dries around, which means the ridges visible on the finished caps are a record of process, not decoration applied afterward. That is closer to how a skate deck's shape is pressed than to how an editorial illustration is drawn, where the file shows the final choice but hides the labor that produced it. Lindeman's caps do the opposite: the labor is the surface.
There is also the matter of the insignias themselves. Team logos and graffiti tags, by their nature, are built to be reproduced endlessly, on jerseys, decks, walls, screens. Lindeman takes that reproducible language and traps it inside a form that resists reproduction entirely. The tension between an infinitely copyable source and a one-of-one object is where the piece does its real work, more than in the caps' texture or color alone.
Read against his editorial output, the caps look less like a detour and more like a correction. Editorial illustration asks him to defer to someone else's resolution, someone else's crop, someone else's platform. A papier-mâché cap answers to no publication and no screen. It sits on a shelf until someone moves it, and that is the whole of its distribution plan.
Lindeman has moved from a category built for reproduction into one built for singularity. The zine documents the caps because the caps themselves are not going anywhere else. This is object-making now, filed under editorial illustration only by habit.