Another day at the banana factory! O glorious bananas. Anyways... todays major task was to layout the flame pattern on the hood of a new Jeep and hopefully get it thru the first stage of paint. The layout went well... it didn't take as long as i thought it'd take to get the fine-line tape where i wanted, but masking was lengthy as usual. I don't like to bother with perfectly mirroring flame patterns because i think it looks less interesting that way. I can appreciate someones work who has done this, but if it's left up to me, i just try to keep it balanced. Once everything was masked off, i based the flames in black (per customer request). Once dry enough, i peeled off all the tape and cleaned up a few edges that bled thru. It's hilarious how long it takes to layout and mask flames in contrast to how long you actually spend painting. Once clean and ready to go, a couple coats of clear are put on. Tomorrow i'll sand out as much of the edge of the flames as i can before they're pinstriped. Breaking up the clear into a couple phases helps sink the flame edge in between pinstriping so that on your final clear you're pretty much left with the pinstripe edge to cut (which is minimal compared to the paint edge since it's done free hand w/ a brush and enamel after the first edge is cut). Also on this job, the pinstripes will be cleared over, so another phase of clear (2 total) is a good way to separate the process. I would rather not try and use enamel over base coat anyway. Once all that was done, i moved back to the remaining Ferrari parts and got them ready for paint... paint them tomorrow to try and wrap everything up with that car. Lots of stuff to keep busy with right now which is great because im usually trying to find new things to learn at this point in the year since not much else is going on... but not this year!!
