Christoff Creations: Airbrushing for a cause.

A couple of months ago I came across a charity that was starting up called I'm 1 in 5. During this time frame I had a huge contest going on in facebook trying to get my fan page up to 500 likes by November 30th. I fell short of the mark. That left me in a bit of confusion as I already had the prize. A Les Paul guitar that was going to have a personalized vinyl wrap on it. In the end I decided to donate the guitar and the design to the charity. I eventually decided not to vinyl wrap the guitar and airbrushed it instead. It's great having the programs and the technology to create just about anything under the sun, but every now and then, gotta go old school. Over the next few days I'll highlight and document all of the steps that I used to create a one of a kind masterpiece for a noble cause. The first step was removing all of the hardware. This was easy enough to do. I used to play oh so long ago. Or tried to at least. The neck is a body through so I had to mask it off which made things a bit more unmanageable but hey, it is what it is and you deal with it and move on. I masked off the cream inlay border as well. I really didn't want to try to remove the paint from it. A very crucial step was steel wooling the finish so the first layer of paint had enough grab. I sprayed a layer of flat black first to give me some undercoat and clean up any imperfections. To give me some bite for the airbrush paint, I sprayed a coat of black satin. Now my base coats were done and they were bullet smooth. The prep work is so crucial because if you shortcut on the prep, no matter what you do. It will never look right.