The 15-Year-Old Force Behind Your Favorite Recent Surfboard Art

At fifteen years old, Ryder Biolos has quite an enviable job. 

As the daughter of Matt Biolos, the co-founder of Lost Surfboards, it seemed inevitable that Biolos would lap Lowers on a quiver of immaculate boards and pursue a career as a surfer. While Ryder does indeed surf, she took her own path and became a surfboard artist. 

As kids, Biolos and her siblings spent a lot of time at the Lost Surfboards factory, messing around with shaping and painting foam blanks that the employees cut out for them. While her siblings simply enjoyed painting the boards, Ryder loved it and discovered she had a natural talent.

“I guess I just had a knack for it,” Biolos says. “My dad is really good at art and my mom’s really into design, so I got it from both ends — the creative design part and the actual artsy part.”

Biolos began regularly frequenting the shop, experimenting with different paint colors and designs, developing her own unique style. Under the guidance of Terry Shin and Drew Brophy, two of the main artists for Lost Surfboards, Biolos quickly learned the tricks of the trade and her skills rapidly progressed.

At age six, Biolos painted her first “real” board, which ended up under the feet of Coco Ho. By age nine, Biolos was a paid employee, regularly painting boards for the Lost team.

“I’ve been so stoked since Ryder has taken the reigns in her own art bay at Lost Surfboards,” says Coco. “She’s known most of us since she was a baby so I feel like there is a personal connection with the art she chooses for your every quiver. A special one was last winter’s quiver — she imitated a piece of art her dad painted in Uncle Derek’s gym. Then, she replicated that on Mason and my winter quiver in memory of Uncle D.”

“Ryder has been one of my favorite artists since she was six,” says Mason Ho. “The first time she ever put color on my board I was so amazed because you could see she had her own style of art. I would try and copy it or have somebody try but it was impossible to get that same vibe. So now she does almost every one of my boards — she’s my favorite.” 

Biolos attends an online charter school, so her schedule is fairly flexible. She works at the shop three to four days a week and has developed a routine of sorts. When she arrives, she checks the orders and consults with the surfer about what they want on their board — sometimes they’ll have something specific in mind and other times they’ll leave it up to her. 

Once she has an idea, Biolos draws or tapes out the design, mixes the colors, and then starts painting. While artists like Brophy paint directly on the glass, Biolos prefers to paint directly on the foam. Depending on the complexity of the design, a board can take anywhere from thirty minutes to six hours. 

“A lot of surfboard painters have a free, loose style,” says Biolos. “But I’m very particular. Everything has to be kind of perfect. Perfectly imperfect.”

While Biolos is a self-proclaimed perfectionist, she’s made her fair share of mistakes over the years. She tries to pay close attention to detail but on occasion, she’ll mess up or accidentally swap orders. Luckily, she’s good at correcting her mistakes. 

“I was taught there’s always a way to fix something,” says Biolos. “If you mess up somewhere, you can just add something or change the way your design was supposed to be.”

At only fifteen years old, Ryder’s resume is extremely impressive. She’s painted boards for 4x world champ and Olympic gold medalist Carissa Moore, 2x world champ Tyler Wright, Olympians Caroline Marks and Kolohe Andino, WSL junior champ Kirra Pinkerton, E.A.S.T. pilots Mason and Coco Ho, Erin Brooks, Sophia Medina, Noah Beschen, and Olympic skateboarding bronze medalist Sky Brown. Take a moment and contemplate the absurd amount of talent contained in that list. 

Biolos enjoys working with all of the surfers equally but of the 500+ boards she’s painted over the years, a few stick out as her personal favorites. She’s proud of the work she recently did on a series of cherry blossom boards with Kirra Pinkerton. She’s also a big fan of a tie-dye line she created for Mason Ho and a Mandalorian board she painted for her brother.

Although Biolos prefers to spend her time backstage, she’s been fortunate to travel around the world with her family and does most of her surfing on surf trips or with friends. When she’s not in the water or the shop, Ryder grabs skis or a snowboard and hits the local mountains whenever possible. 

While Biolos took a few art classes in elementary school, her work is mainly the result of Brophy and her dad’s direction. She’s inspired by their work and has learned a lot from them over the years. 

“Working with my dad is fun and hard at the same time,” says Biolos. “He tells me the truth — if I mess up he’s not afraid to say that I messed up. But he makes it fun too.”

As far as the future goes, Biolos is just taking things as they come. She’s currently working on a project with Catch Surf and Lib Tech Snowboards. She plans to continue working for her dad but long term hopes to pursue a career in some sort of design, architecture, or graphic design.

For now, though, the surf community is fortunate to have her around — particularly the great many of us who are familiar with the sinking feeling that arrives shortly after executing a bad idea with a can of spray paint on the surface of a brand new board.