So, whether you ultimately believe skateboarding is a sport or an art, what's undeniable is that a lot of skateboarders have been attracted to art and, likewise, a lot of artists have been attracted to skateboarding.

A short, but poignant, multihued watercolor animation of Jason Dill, by 22-year-old British artist Matthew Box, continues in this artistic vein. After Box posted the hauntingly beautiful Dill animation on his Vimeo account in October -- and the video was subsequently reposted on a number of influential blogs and forums -- he received a steady-stream of views and praise, even an interview request from the prestigious Atlantic magazine.

The work, the first of what Box envisions as an entire "Acid Drops" series commemorating individual pro-skaters, was created using a painstaking process known as rotoscopy. Though the film only runs 68 seconds it required Box to create nearly 400 individual paintings, which he would begin by tracing footage of Dill off an old computer monitor.

A lifelong insomniac, Box says he spent many restless hours burning the midnight-oil and watching "American sit-coms" and a Smiths documentary as he created the animation of the veteran skater, whom Chad Muska once described as "very artsy."

"Not many sports reward you for having your own weird style," said Box, when asked about skateboarding's penchant for attracting creative types. "It has a fantastic D.I.Y. ethic that runs through it."

Not surprisingly Box cites a diverse selection of artists as influences, some who can kickflip and some who cannot.

"Ed Templeton within the skateboarding world. I used to draw Toy Machine characters on my books at school," he says from his High Wycombe home, about a half-hour outside London. "I love David Hockney. A gallery opened in Nottingham while I was at university there, with a huge Hockney exhibition. It had his swimming pool paintings that I'm always amazed by. Water is such an impossible thing to paint."

But what, a reporter wondered, made him wake up one day and decide, "I need to make a poetic watercolor animation of Jason Dill set to a Tom Waits song ('Fawn')?" Had he been drinking/experimenting with any substances we should know about?

"I'm not really into narcotics," Box says. "To be honest, it's probably more the hallucinatory qualities of insomnia."