Grammy Car

   This is a Cadillac SRX I was hired to paint live at the L.A. Art Show at the Santa Monica Airport from January 25 -29th. It was kind of sudden, because I had barely returned from a trip to Mexico. I got a call on the 25th early in the morning and by four o clock in the afternoon I was already setting up my paints to get started on it. The only info I got over the phone when talking to the people in charge was that they wanted the theme to be of the Grammy's and that it would be a live demo, they gave me the model of the car I was to paint, and that was basically it. Although it has been a month and a half since I painted this, I hadn't had a chance to upload the images on my website, so I figured I would do it here.

   Here is a picture of the basic layout, when I got to the place where I would be working, they gave a poster for the upcoming Grammy show, and asked me if I could replicate it on the car, to which I answered yes, but of course in my own style. So I copied some of the musicians, and painted the trophy reallly big, and added the music notes and simbols. I did a quick search for grammy photos before I left my house, which helped me out a lot when I got there.

Close-up of the Artwork.
I start off by painting the image in whites, this is because I use Kandy Concentrate colors, and they are transparent, so the color by itself would not show on a dark color background like this one. For the dark areas and shadows of the image, I let the color of the background to show through, another reason I prefer to work like this is because some paint jobs have metallic paints or flakes that look better if it shows through the airbrush work as oppposed to just covering it up.

   Here I am painting on the side of the Cadillac, the only thing I didn't like about this project was that it was cold and windy in Santa Monica, even with the sun out! I think it was as low as 60 degrees! I almost froze my ass off.(Ha, ha, ha notice the glove on left hand)
The good thing about it is that I got to talk to a lot of people I don't usually come in contact with, and I'm pretty sure most of them had never seen someone painting on the side of a car. I know this because of the comments I heard, I was surprised how many people thought I was doing graffitti on the side of a nice car!, but then they would come closer and be surprised at the detail. And I would tell them that I wish I knew how to do graffitti, they get paid more than me.



Well, this is the right side of the car, I basically kept the same layout with the trophy on the center, and a musician next to it, but I painted a girl as if she was a presenter with the trophy. I'm not sure what they did with the car, they had mentioned to me as I was working on it that they were gonna take it to the Grammy Award Celebration but they never told me what it would be used for.