Q - When did you actually turn professional? A - I haven’t LOL Well my first paid job was about five years ago which was about a year after I had picked up an airbrush, I put an advert on E-Bay you cant do it now because of their rules and regulations but back then I placed an ad saying I will paint your guitar if I remember rightly it was for about a 100 pounds and a guy took me up on it. It was a Star Wars guitar and that was about five years ago. After that I did it again and put a little portfolio together thinking I could make some money at this and I haven’t looked back since.
Q - Are you solely a airbrush guy or do you use any other implements? A - Nine times out of ten I will use a sheet of masking, occasionally a freehand stencil. At the moment I am into using colored pencils for really fine detail. I used to be the type that had to airbrush everything but then I thought why, the customer isn’t worried about that it’s not like they are gonna say is this 100% airbrushed if not I’m not going to pay for it. Plus I have been get- ting some really cool affects with the pencils so I will be using them a lot more. Now and then I also use Edding Aerospace markers as they are water based pigments’ they do not react with auto air or wicked col- ors. Sometimes a paint brush, yeah I don’t really think about what I am using just whatever comes to hand really to get the job done. I do however have one bit of advice for the readers do not use a CD pen I used one once and it bled through everything and then went brown so please do not use them.
Q - Are you involved with any guitar companies or is all your work for individuals A - Both really I do work for companies such as ESP, Brian May, Indi Guitars. Well when I say Indi that ended up as only a one off the reason being that I just had to much other work going on, but it was a cool job the gui- tar was called the bling of fire, at the time the bull’s-eye guitar was very popular and they asked me to create something along that line so I did a bull’s-eye of fire. I did receive quite a lot of reactions about that job a lot of people thought that it should have been left as the black and white version instead of adding the color but all in all the job turned out really good. As for Brian May his guitar tech Andrew Guyton was commissioned to do a version of Brian’s Red Special guitar in black and Andrew Guyton had heard of me and had seen my work so he asked me to paint the logo from the Musical We
Will Rock You on the guitar and it was signed by Brian and presented to Peter Johansson who played the lead roll from 2002 to 2005.
Q - Your David Mann tribute bike has won a lot of awards how did that project come about ? A - That was purely down to the customer, the owner of that bike was a big David Mann fan and he just want- ed his artwork all over the bike, I think he had been to a few airbrush artist for a quote and I suppose I was the cheapest, so he gave me a list of images to choose from. But I’ve got to be honest there is a part of that bike that I was not happy with and that is the tank, two of the images blend together really well. The top im- age and the image on the right hand side of the tank have both horizons’ in them so I could blend the sky together but the client was adamant that he wanted a bar/saloon image on the left hand side of the tank. So you have got a big mass of wood paneling on the left side and to me it looked totally out of place but hey the customer gets what the customer wants. Unfortu- nately that bike bounced down the motorway/ highway a couple of months ago and is now a write-off.
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