11/7/2023 0 Comments Examples of pinstriping on cars![]() ![]() Along the way, he offers kernels of wisdom. Working from a photo of the car's original lettering, he feels out the drag of the wet brush. Zunker, who is 76 years old and has suffered multiple strokes, does not. Many sign painters use a maulstick, a tool that looks like a honey server, to lean against the car and steady their brush hand. Watching Zunker work makes it seem impossible. Maybe it sounds improbable that thousands of artists mastered all these idiosyncrasies. Then there are hardeners, tinters, smalts, and gold leaf, the application of which involves a halved cucumber (seriously) and deserves its own article. Larger swaths, like the tall numbers on a Baja truck, might call for the chunkier pigments of bulletin paint. Lettering requires a unique enamel, made using superfine pigments. Nick BerardĮvery professional has a sign kit, basically a mechanic's cabinet crossed with an oversized lunch pail, Pandora's box of bristles and paint. Stabilo pencil outlines, filled with a "mop" and outlined in red with a "quill," left hand holding the brush hand steady. Different brush hairs offer a different feel. There are countless variations, flat-edged and fine-tipped, narrow "quills" and larger "mops," each for conjuring a certain line. Letterers use special long-hair brushes for carrying consistent color over long strokes. The outline goes straight onto the car with a Stabilo pencil. Smaller, more intricate work is entirely freehand. It's also how Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel. This is how you'd create a uniform set of large Bosch or Goodyear logos. Tear away the paper, then hand-paint the graphite impression in color. (Imagine a pizza cutter, but with a small spur instead of a rotary blade.) Hang the paper and beat it with a canvas bag of powdered graphite to transfer the outline through the spur marks. Consider pouncing, where you freehand sketch designs onto thin paper, then retrace those lines using a special handheld tool. The brushstrokes might as well be braille. But stumble across an old hand-painted one, and it asks for your ear. Walk past a pretty race car now, and it may catch your eye. Zunker, now semiretired, agreed to show us how it's done, because "vinyl is like taking your sister to the prom." He's not wrong. Also windows, billboards, storefronts, fire engines, and at least one local news helicopter. He's been painting numbers and letters by hand since the early Sixties, a brush on everything from speedboats to Roger McCluskey's stock car. Luckily, there are still a few traditionalists kicking around. ![]() Because, like so many insular, old-timey trades, the process remains something of a mystery. Before it disappears completely, we wanted to see a car hand-painted in person. So even with the Etsy crowd's renewed interest in signcraft, automotive letterform is dying out. Vinyling saves an appreciable amount of weight, not to mention that sponsorships change rapidly, and applying simple decals can be done on the fly. Hand-lettering commercial fleets, such as parts trucks, isn't economically viable at modern scale. Shoe polish or white tape would do in a pinch. ![]() Before vinyl (and, later, computerized vinyl plotters) became popular during the Seventies and Eighties, a person with paint and brushes did this painstaking work. Boyle Valve had an emblem, and Maserati had an emblem, but the "Boyle Special" at Indy? Something different entirely. That meant laying down racing numbers, the car's nickname, drivers, mechanics, and parts suppliers, all by hand, using optical illusions for legibility and impact, or tweaking the shapes and colors of sponsor logos.
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