#15. Jean's 1991 Toyota Corolla

November 2010

As Jean – ever an optimist – said, "Clearly, we don't understand each other." I had delivered her painted car to her, but it's not what she had in mind. Once this lettering enamel is on, it's on, so the only remedy is to add more paint. We'll do that when the weather warms up. Until then, here's her car, which I like very much. Still, I don't want anyone driving a car she doesn't love, so I'll show the AFTER pictures, um, AFTER I repaint the car!

And here they are:

Jean felt that the contrast of the black paint and the silver car was too much, so, at her suggestion, I lightly sponged lavender over most of the black and the dark blues. I had real reservations, but she's the boss, and behold! she was perfectly correct! My personal taste runs to high contrast and plenty of bold, but this tamped-down version of the car is really, really pretty.

Well done, Jean!

#14. Julie's GeckoMobile

October 2010

Julie's 2005 Scion xA was a ball to paint. In the first place, she has bought at least one – and usually more – of almost everything I've ever made, so painting for a fan is wonderful. She won the bid for the gecko I painted as a fundraiser for the Gulfport Merchants Association at the Geckos in Wonderland Ball in 2010, and placed it at Peg's Cantina (www.pegscantina.com) so the whole public can enjoy it. Now that's a patron of the arts.

And after I painted that gecko (on both sides, as shown above, along with my right foot), Julie decided she wanted a GeckoMobile, so that's what she got.

She chose orange and gold, with black for the background of the critters. I do wish the photos would show how gorgeous those colors are against black, with the texture of the sponges. I threw in bits of Tulip brand 3-D blue glitter paint. That turned out to be a very nice touch. I used gold Tulip, too. I'm turning into a crow: If it sparkles, I like it!

#13. Mike's Kia Sedona

May 2010

Here's where technology became my friend: I never could have done that labyrinth without the help of a sign-making friend, Gordy Saunders, and his vinyl plotter. The above is a detail on the hood. Note (if you can, in this horrible photo of mine!) the sharp shadow on the bird at the left. The bird is rounded but her shadow is knife-like. That's in keeping with the idea that the Tree of Life is ultimately the Tree of Death, too, since you can't have one without the other.

This was the first car painted at my new house – in privacy, that is. What a thrill!

#12. Anne's 1998 Volvo S-70, Sven

October 2009

Anne wanted this silver Volvo painted in the style of Gustav Klimt. Thank god she lent me her book on him. I was only vaguely familiar with The Kiss, possibly his most well-known piece. I know him a lot better now, and in fact have painted many other things in his gorgeous gold-and-copper motif.

This car is best seen close up and in the flesh, so ... unless you live in Gulfport, you lose. Sorry.

#11. Olga's 2008 Honda Fit

May 2009

What a joy to paint such a new car! The surface is so smooth and nice! When I clean up a drool or wipe off a mistake, only the 1-SHOT itself comes off -- not the paint underneath, as has happened with older, jury-rigged cars I've painted.

I loved buying the powdered aluminum for the glitter. I just like esoteric things. Who even knew you could buy such a thing? Not I. It turns out, though, that mixing the aluminum into the paint just gave it a metallic look, not the glittery look I was hoping for.

Andrea had given me a glitter gun, but in the first place, it required a pretty full hopper to use it and I wasn't willing to dump out that much of the expensive aluminum powder. In the second place, I wasn't sure it would blast into the paint hard enough to stick or if it would work when the surface was more vertical than horizontal, like the slanted hood of the car. In the end, my simple ignorance kept me from using any more glitter than I did.

I only used it on the name of the car, Lakshmi, which I'd written in Sanskrit. It was a reverse at first. That is, the name itself was the car's finish, surrounded by a dark magenta cloud formed by a loose sponge -- that egg-carton sponge people use on top of their mattresses. When I cleaned off the paper that was protecting the actual shape of the characters, I saw that I could easily (yay!) paint the insides lavender, so I did. And then I just took spoons full of glitter and dumped them onto the wet paint.

Well, that was a mistake, but not a fatal one. The result is that very little of the lavender shows through. When the car's in the shade, the name looks a bit muddy, with lavender and aluminum together. In the sun, though, the glitter's fabulous.

Next time, I'd use 1-SHOT clear-coat and fill it with the aluminum. Then I'd brush it on wherever I wanted glitter.

As it happens, Olga's delighted with just the name being glittery, so whew. The picture below shows "Lakshmi" before it got dry enough for me to wipe off the excess glitter. In fact, you know the nature of glitter: Olga will be finding it everywhere for months to come.

The next time I agree that type really needs to be used on a car, I wonder if I'll just charge a lot extra to buy vinyl from my sign-maker friend Gordy. As a typographer, I really hate seeing bad type. That "Lakshmi" was the size and font of a typewriter, but I blew it way, way up -- about 1100%.

With the other Sanskrit phrase, I was able to find it whole and in a nice script (Sanscript -- heh) online. I blew it up (with the help of Office Depot for eleven whole cents) and carefully cut it out. I put it on the car, using a glue stick so the fine edges would stay stuck. Then I used that loose sponge again and poofed a cloud of paint around the type. This is not for the faint-hearted. I let it spend the night outside, and then I went out and started picking the painted-over paper off the car. The paint certainly wasn't cured by then, but it was dry enough that I could soak the paper with water and peel it off that way. I used a mineral spirits-soaked Q-tip to clean up the type inside.

What else?

Well, Olga loves her car, which is great, of course. In fact, she and Liz are still raving to me about it whenever I talk to them. And why not? I still feel excited inside when I start off in my car each day, and especially when someone new sees it and is surprised and pleased by such a thing. I bet I'll never get tired of driving an art-car!

And yes. See the hyphen. I've decided that, from this day forth, I shall hyphenate the thing. Or maybe I should just rush the natural transition (like global warming) and jump to a non-hyphenated compound word: artcar. Yep. That's it. You just witnessed evolution!