Friday, September 20, 2013

Patricks 1940's Bomber

Patrick desired a 1940's Warplane motif with simple hand painted graphics and a distressed look that speaks of vintage parts and history. A modern-day relic, so to speak.  

We started out by laying down a primer/base coat of powdered aircraft grey, giving it a nice industrial finish.  While the base was cooling, I got to work on the graphics, simple military style stencil and bomber plane motif of the era, fitting of the handpainted designs that adorned many planes.  As I am not using any decals on this frame, I used the waving flag insigna that I made for the Smiley Bikes...felt like it kinda fit the theme.


Once the masking was cut, I rubbed the frame out with black, rust brown, and a darker battleship grey, using a variety of application techinques from crumpled paper towels, scotch brite pads, and 80 grit emory cloth to get the distressed look we were going for.


I then masked off the frame and airbrushed on the blue panels, leaving high and low spots in the saturation to give some depth.  Then the masking was applied.


As we are going for the handpainted look, I used a course horse hair brush to apply the white to the lettering and pin up sillohette.


The other masks, inteded for black paint, received airbrushed work, as the black sits better under the matte clear the thinner it is.


Immediately after shooting the PPG DBC Black, I rough it up slightly with an abrasive pad


Peel away the masks and you have your finished lettering in simple, weathered black.


I normally like to do airbrushed, detailed pin ups, but money and time were parameters on this build, so a simple sillohette had to suffice.  Clean and classy.


Some missions logged on the motif...airbrushed bombs in the same style as the black lettering.


The finished product after matte clear is applied...the final layer does a nice job of darkening up the colors and blending.

 
The Fed Ex guy stopped in for a delivery and saw the frame...he asked if that old bike was in to be stripped and repainted as it looked worn out.  I guess we acheived our goal  :)

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