Here we have an Ibanez guitar body in for a refinish...............and maybe some custom paintwork.

.......first thing to do was to rub down the old finish. Ironically, had the previous finishers rubbed their lacquer down like this it would actually have polished up a treat, but now we had other plans for this guitar!

I'm a bit of a sky freak (Nope.......I'm not a hippy!). I like sunsets, sunrises, night skies, cloudy skies, you name it skywise and I've probably gazed at it at some length. Without doubt one of the most amazing skies I ever saw was during a night exercise whilst in the Royal Marines, way up in the North of Norway. This particular night the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights), were so spectacular that two troops of rufty tufty Royal Marines on a night exercise - all stood staring in awe at the heavens in absolute silence.............Anyway, luckily for me living in Orkney, we also see the Northern Lights here on occassion (albeit not as spectacularly as in Norway) and I'd been wondering about trying to paint them for a while, so this seemed like a golden opportunity......after all, even if it didn't work..................could always repaint this guitar red again!

So here we go. Okay, with the body rubbed down and perfectly smooth a new basecoat was applied. In this case a midnight blue colour.

Then some stars were painted onto the surface of the guitar.

Next a lighter nightsky horizon line was painted in............

And then the 'lights' themselves were lightly airbrushed in.

After a bit more work they're starting to look about right..................

Here the silhouette of some pine trees were painted in to give the sky some depth.......

Once all the paint was in place and the scene was looking about right, the guitar received it's first new coat of lacquer.

Okay, jumped a few stages here as there wasn't much to actually see. Basically the guitar was rubbed down after the initial lacquer coat and some final painting work was reapplied. Then the guitar went through various stages of lacquering, rubbing down, re-lacquering............more rubbing down, more lacquer............you get the picture. Eventually the guitar was finally rubbed down through the grades of wet and dry and the surface was ready for polishing.

Here some final polishing work is being done on the edges of the guitar body.

Starting to look something like...............

Here the back is pretty much finished...........

And the front is looking pretty good.

It's actually difficult to take piccies of this guitar without getting reflections of lights.............

Or the camera in the picture.........................

And there's always one spec of dust that manages to elude the duster!

But overall, a much better looking guitar than we started with................

Even the headstocks a bit better than it was...............

So there it is 'after' re-refinishing..............my first attempt at painting the Northern Lights onto a guitar.

The hardware is replaced.......

And the guitar is ready to go.......

Time to start playing with some trick paints and taking this idea further me thinks! - and so it was that the Merry Dancers Guitar came to be..................

Merry Dancers Guitar Project

 

All artwork and images are Copyright © Jim Fogarty 2002-2009. All rights reserved. All artwork shown on this website is protected by international copyright law. No image on this website may be used for any commercial or non-commercial purposes without prior written permission from the artist.