finished art!

well, here i am again... so remember a couple posts ago how i was talking about how i thought i could paint with an airbrush with the rest of em? yeah, my chance came and went... you decide how well it came off...

some backstory: my buddy, dave, is a goalie. freakin' ninja goalie. anyways, he got bored with the stock "devil/demon" thing on his helmet, and we started talking about how to improve it. his family developed a board game called "Swashbuckled!" that is way fun to play. their main logo, or mascot, if you will, is a skull with a hat and crossed old school flintlock pistols... (blunderbusses? blunderbussi? i dunno, i just wanted to use the word) we decided that it'd look pretty sweet on a helmet, with dave looking mean out the mouth of the skull. so... we started. brought his helmet to work, put the image on a projector, covered the helmet in masking tape, and then traced skullito the pirate (my name, not his). over a couple nights, he came down to the house, and we painted, while the wives played (chick flicks, and homework, i believe, were the order of the weekend)

my camera is a little wonky sometimes, so that's the reason this took so long, but after fighting with it for a while, and a little "windows picture gallery - auto-adjust magic"... here they are!

here i am getting ready to paint... turns out this was entirely unnecessary, as there wasn't much overspray (in my direction) and it got hot way too fast...

the weapon, and first victim - the rear headguard for a goalie helmet... (is that the right word? who knows...)

work in progress, i believe this is after the first coat of blue.

here, prepping to paint the brown of the pistols...

after the brown was painted, this is what it looked like, pretty much.

another mid-shot, it was getting dark, and garage light isn't what i really needed it to be with my flash not working. this shot is what it started to look like after we painted the gold parts of the gun.

here's the finished product, in its home environment. before we called it done, i highlighted the edges of the skull with some brown to age it a little, and left the hat the original black of the helmet. dave went in and finished up the details on the skull and guns by hand. he then used a rattle can shellac-type stuff to try to protect the paint job...

i think it turned out pretty good for a first attempt! now it's just time for practice, practice, practice! what can i paint next... i do have a nice shiny portable hard drive that is just begging to have something awesome on it... the best part is, if i don't like it, i can just paint over it!