Day In The Life

I’ve been holed up in a bodyshop all day, painting a drag car. After staring for 7 hours at airbrushed lines, which are fuzzy, your eyes forget how to focus, so reading is difficult for a time afterwards. So, some pictures. I do this every so often for my commercial website – today I decided to share the step by step process here.
To save page loading time, only the first three are on this page. The rest are in the expanded entry.

	A digital rough layout of the design, slapped together on the computer, over a photo of the customer’s car.
	Before. The shop has painted the base color, which was then clearcoated and resanded. Good boys. Did my taping for me.
	After spraying over the existing deep maroon paint with a light dusting of white, the background colors are set up.

The background blues are then defined and blended back into the maroon base.

At this point I move from full sized production gun to the airbrush. Everything is painted freehand. The bird and lettering is lightly outlined, then blocked in with white before lighter colours like red violet, and yellow are sprayed. (The intermediate photos weren’t good enough to bother with – too much flash reflection.)

	Me, painting. Usually, the hose hangs over my shoulders.
	The other side is done at the same time.

So, I’m at about the midway point – where the work moves from “OH MY GOD – WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY CAR?” to the “Wow.. that’s cool.. what do you mean you’re only started?” stage …. there is no detailing yet, of course, only rough layout of major colors. Tomorrow, the finish work, and the helmet.
(This little Monza is also parked at the OTB Traffic Jam)
update – Next day’s progress..