Car'toos

#17. Eunice's 1991 Toyota Corolla DX, "Dixie"

2011-09-12T17:26:00.000-07:00

September 2011

A couple days before her seventy-fifth birthday, Eunice picked up her painted car. Happy birthday, Eunice! She paints pet portraits (www.pet-drawings.com) and was my neighbor when I painted my first car. She always said she liked driving through our alley and watching the progress I was making. The time finally came when I painted her car.

This was another collaboration – my second. Eunice drew twelve animals on brown kraft paper, and then cut them out. I glued the resulting stencils to her freshly painted car and filled them with black. The plan was for me to decorate each animal – polka dots! scribbles! swirls! checkerboards! – but when it came down to it, I decided they looked better solid black, except for a couple defining lines with an orange Sharpie oil paint pen, which we later found out faded really quickly. Shame on you, Mister Sharpie.

Because positioning a curling, thin border – the stencil itself – would be very awkward, I used the center of the drawing for that purpose. Once I liked its orientation, I taped it in place and glued the stencil around the interior.

Then I removed the interior.

And filled the center with black paint.

I expected the edges to be sharp because I used a glue stick on them, and really glued 'em down tight. I also expected the edges to be sharp because I am delusional. If the paper absorbed the glue, it also absorbed the paint, but I wasn't thinking that far ahead. Therefore, the edges were rough at best ...

... and horrifying at worst.

But it was nothing mineral spirits + elbow grease couldn't handle. Also, I immediately liked the rough effect. It went along with the great texture of sponge-painting in the first place, and it added fur – even to critters who don't have fur ...

And then I just made some fun designs on the bottom of the car, using the great colors Eunice had chosen. I herded all the critters together with bright magenta dots. On the roof, where the parrot lives, I made stylized flowers using more dots. It's true that I saw the resemblance of the flowers to paw prints, but it's equally true that I dismissed paw prints as being trite. Eunice agreed with me ... and yet ... and yet ... And so a handful of the flowers did in fact become paw prints, so it's only a minor cliché.

#16. Geri's 1993 Volkswagen Eurovan

2011-05-03T16:29:00.000-07:00

March 2011

Geri, a mosaicist who was my neighbor-vendor at Circus McGurkis one year, called me to say she'd decided to have me paint her van. It's a big van, too, with a Westfalia roof – a roof that opens up into a sort of camper.

Since I have that horrible fear of heights thing (which is really a horrible fear of falling thing), I wondered how I'd be able to get up on that roof to paint it, but I did. Cheryl Cawthon, my acupuncturist of all things, figured out a way for me to set up a scaffold, and my friend Bob Phillips came by one morning with a second ladder. I made him watch me get up and get down again, and I did it without breaking my neck. Al Scott told me to be sure to keep my cell phone with me. I would have been embarrassed to ... what? call the fire department to get me down, like a kitten in a tree in a Dick and Jane book? Yes. Still, there were two times when I thought it might come to that, but I talked myself down (heh), and so now I think I'm all big and brave.

Geri chose these great colors, and said she pretty much wanted vertical stripes. The stripes could be made out of whatever I wanted: squares, balls, snowflakes, whatever. She wanted some Klimt-type poppies and some paisleys. As you can see from the top picture, it looks like a blanket, a tapestry. I really like this van!

The roof is a field of poppies, but I haven't yet seen it from any perspective other than my sitting cross-legged on it, quivering. When Geri opens the roof for camping, she'll take some photos, and when I get 'em, you'll get 'em.

#15. Jean's 1991 Toyota Corolla

2011-01-19T10:41:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-19T09:53:00.000-08:00

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

2010-09-06T12:17:00.001-07:00

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

2010-09-06T10:51:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-07T10:41:00.000-07:00

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!

#10. Liz's 2002 Nissan X-terra

2009-04-20T11:53:00.000-07:00

January 2009

I gave the paint job to Liz for her seventy-fourth birthday. You'll agree with me that she hardly looks her age; hardly acts it, either.

She had a black-and-white tote that served as the model for the design on her SUV. It worked out great, didn't it? The biggest challenge on this car was getting a decent photo, but Lee Miller came through again.

#9. Jill's 2000 Mazda MPV

2009-04-20T11:01:00.000-07:00

November 2008

Now this car's paint job was totally out of the world of my experience. Jill wanted it to be a home-school project, and that meant having her, her husband, and their six-year-old daughter in my house, my space, my ... ah ... Muse Room.

I don't even like my best friends to be in my house, so you can imagine the trauma. Plus: a kid. What do I know from kids?

And that's all I can say politely, but I will add that it wasn't exactly as horrid as I had feared, and Jill and I have met for social purposes only and it's been quite lovely. I still don't know about kids, but I do know I enjoy Riva's company. So there.

We decided to paint rough color blocks in checkerboard fashion on this white van, and then decorate in the colored and white boxes. It got to looking pretty chaotic, though, which is a reasonable result when two people who don't know what they're doing start doing it anyhow. The downbeat theory that Buddy Helm (http://www.buddyhelm.com/) was teaching me during drumming sessions at The Longhouse (http://www.longhouse.info/) saved the day.

As long as the downbeat is smacked out loud and clear and a tempo, anything goes. If you get lost while you're out there between downbeats, it's okay, because the whole group will beat the down. It's kind of like North on a compass.

So we got the idea to put my traditional "tribals" -- very basic mudcloth markings from Mali -- in black (as opposed to the very cheerful colors we were otherwise using) on the first, third, and fifth of five lines. That held everything together -- just like it does in music -- and the van looks pretty cool.

I rarely want to paint the wheels or rims or hubcaps or whatever those blasted things are called, but it worked really well on this car. We even took turns riding in my car next to their car so we could all see what the wheels look like at about 40mph. Faster than that, we think you should keep your eyes on the road.

I'm a solitary sort of person. I live alone. I work alone. My favorite pastimes are one-person gigs -- reading and writing -- so collaboration was a challenge. I told Jill that I wrote to Buddy about the downbeat working in paint, and she wanted to offer him photos of the car in exchange for drumming sessions. Oh. Apparently she thought the car was hers. Um, and apparently I thought the paint job was mine. So yeah. I learned a lot with this car, too.

#7. Banyan Scapes, Inc. Bug Truck

2009-04-20T10:52:00.001-07:00

April 2008

You can't have foliage without bugs, so here's another Banyan Scapes Nursery truck, complete with Stefan, the owner, being all color-coordinated and everything. And yes, I know a peacock feather isn't a bug, but still ...

Too bad Mister Google didn't get the orientation right on photo #7, and too bad I can't fix it, either. Sigh.

#6. Banyan Scapes, Inc. Foliage Truck

2009-04-20T10:37:00.000-07:00

April 2008

As you can see, I have no business lettering anything or trying to make realistic renderings. This was for a new nursery in Gulfport. I think it's great that the owner was willing to let an artist paint the truck instead of having a sign-maker do it all at his computer in vinyl ...not that there's anything wrong with that ...

#5. bien5, my second car, a 1990 Toyota Corolla

2009-04-20T10:23:00.000-07:00

April 2007

I drove this poor thing naked for two months (er ... the car, not me). I just couldn't imagine how to paint on red. On the other hand, after so many years of driving an art car, I just hated not driving one, so I picked up my sponges and cracked open a can of 1-SHOT.

I'd been doing research for a belly dancer who later changed her mind. Still, that's how I got the paisleys on the driver side. I'm a major fan of spirals. In fact, if I'd done the passenger side first, the whole car would have had that design.

I'm still not happy with the roof or the hood, but my own car is usually a work in progress ... The tailgate was an African village but it was awful, and there's no way to take the paint off. I painted Grandma's Quilt on top of the village, though, so everything turned out okay.

I only named this car bien5 because art car show people really want names. I don't like to name things, especially inanimate things. But this worked out, since bien50 combines the phonetic spelling of my initials (bn) and my birth year -- and this was the fifth car I painted. I just call it "my car." I absolutely love it that bien is so good in Spanish and French.

Lee Miller took that great photo of my car and me up at the top.

Yay, Lee!

#4. "Stardust," Mike's 1988 Volvo GLE 740

2009-04-20T10:15:00.000-07:00

March 2006

This was fun to paint. The general theme was Night Sky, but Mike also wanted that famous caveman scene, the DNA helix, the infinity symbol, and a lot of Native American symbols. I got to invent a different planet for each of the rims, and I used glow-in-the-dark paint for the comet on the roof.

#3. Jo's 1987 Dodge Dakota

2009-04-20T10:06:00.000-07:00

Christmas 2005

This was a working truck for Jo's humane trapping business -- Dusk to Dawn, Critters Begone! Given the business title, we worked with opposites and with animals. Her grandmother was a Jain Buddhist, so we went with Indians both east and west, and male and female. For instance, the Native American Sky Snake, always a male, is on the back of the truck. There's a very feminine -- and eastern -- lotus on the top of the cab.

This might be my favorite so far.

#2. Fernando's 1989 Pontiac 6000 LE

2009-04-19T18:44:00.000-07:00

Thanksgiving 2005

I learned a whole lot with this car. I learned that starting without a theme is a bad idea. I learned that painting on white is NOT the Oh goody! a fresh canvas experience you'd think it should be. I learned that people don't all see things the same way. These were all good lessons and I'm glad Fernando was gracious enough to help me learn them. Ahem.

#1. My First Art Car, a 1987 Toyota Cressida

2009-04-19T11:19:00.000-07:00

July 2001?

My friend Beth and I think we've narrowed down the time to this date. I do remember it was the Fourth of July weekend when I started painting. Although I am perfectly old enough to have seen all the hippie cars and vans, I never saw a painted car until I saw Fishbone's in 2000, I think. It blew my hair back. I was in love.

Fishbone agreed to paint it, but he had a major procrastination problem (with which I identify). But boo hoo! I'm not an artist. I can't draw. I don't know how to hold a brush.

Then I saw a kid-sized table and chairs at Diana's house. She had painted them using sponges. Aha! I know how to handle a pair of scissors!

My friend Gordy's a signmaker and he told me all I needed to know about 1-SHOT, the lettering enamel that causes cancer in California.

Off I went, and off I still go.

I'd had the amazing opportunity to spend five weeks in Ghana, West Africa, in August of 1998. That experience pushed me over the edge into afrophilia -- a short trip -- as seen on that Cressida. Almost every drop of paint shows off an Adinkra symbol or Ashanti fabric. You can see other African influences on my things at

http://www.bien50etc.blogspot.com/.

I can't imagine it ever leaving me.

That gye nyame on the hood is also on the hood of my 1990 Toyota Corolla. The symbol is called Except God or But God in Ghana. It was everywhere: on signs and fabrics and tile. I was told it refers to the idea that no one was around to see God create the world, and no one will be around to see the end of the world -- except God. That's from the mouths of people in Ghana. From websites comes a more concise if not more accurate version: Gye nyame represents the supremacy of God.

The design on the trunk is a stylized (of course) version of the Ghana flag.

Man, I loved that Cressida!

#8. Mark's Ride -- a 1995 Honda Accord

2009-04-19T09:56:00.000-07:00

July 2008

This is the only car I painted with something other than 1-SHOT. I loved the fact that I could reuse the sponges and paint pans, and that I could clean up with water. But I really don't like the coverage. I guess they named it 1-SHOT for a reason ...

I used AFM Safecoat brand All-Purpose Exterior Satin (Accent Base), a non-toxic paint. I bought it at HealthyHome, a green building supply company, in St. Petersburg. The can even says it's "Doctor Recommended," which seems funny but I don't know why. I suppose if I had a paint allergy, if there's such a thing, I wouldn't think it's funny at all.

http://www.healthyhome.com/