Pinstriping? I got your pinstriping right here!

[Frog]

I just got off the phone with master Northern California pinstriper Herb Martinez. A mutual friend mistakenly sent him my way for help with some CS 3 issues.
At any rate, one thing lead to another and he turned me on to this video of how it's done in India, by someone who pretty obviously knows what he is doing!

[screenxpress]

About all I can say is HOLY SH!T, is that incredible!!

[mooseman]

THAT IS AMAZING...but I'll bet he can't fix a computer issue
mooseman

[3Deep]

Talk about having a steady hand, chit I can't draw a straight line without a straight edge

[mk162]

a lot of pinstripers will steady their hand with their pinky on the substrate.  that guy has done a few of those

[GaryG]

Yeah us printers have a hard enough time touching up a dingleberry fuzzball,
and not getting our hand in the wet ink before going though dryer.

Impressive

[Command-Z]

Wow, yes, that's a steady and very confident hand.

[Itsa Little CrOoked]

a lot of pinstripers will steady their hand with their pinky on the substrate.  that guy has done a few of those

Precisely correct.

I cut my teeth hand lettering close to 50 years ago. Never was a striper though.

You soon learn to use a pinky in certain ways, depending on the design.

I still have Mahl sticks laying around here somewhere... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQXR_Xtf0oA  That is the preferred alternative to Mister Pinky for some jobs.

Let me say this. The Enfield striper in Andy's video is quite good. HOWEVER(!)... mistakes are easily corrected with a touch of mineral spirits and a rag. That guy likely couldn't do some of the stuff the stripers that did the Fancy Schmancy Curly-Q's I oogled at in the sign business magazines my dad displayed on the coffee table 5 decades ago. These are different skills. Complimentary, but different.

I repeat. I couldn't do either....RIGHT NOW....but striping the same gas tanks day after day would soon "learn ya" as my grandpa used to say.

We once decorated a Catholic Church in Danville Kansas with 8 or 9 HUNDRED(!) gold leafed thing-a-ma-jigs. (I was a kid, and I forget the details.) They surrounded the interior about chest height...like a Wainscot. You get one shot and putting the lines in the right place on the wall. If you screwed up, you just screwed up. It would be too expensive now, since gold went all whackadoodle in price the last few decades.  Man!  I can almost see those ornaments in my head... Sort of a "Fleur de lis" looking Catholic symbol of some kind.

I was never as good as my recently departed Daddy. Played the trombone instead.

Stan

For the inquisitive, Google "Letterheads" for more info. Not as big deal of a deal in the USA anymore. Gold leaf in Europe still thrives in certain places.

[mk162]

we had a guy working for us that was an old sign painter.  he did a sign at Alice Cooper's apartment complex one time.  Recognized him by the pool, but of course he gave him his real name, and then fessed up to who he really was.

He also spilled a quart of red paint from up on the ladder there...evidently it went EVERYWHERE.

[Itsa Little CrOoked]

Of course. From UP ON THE ladder!

I never did that, but I did a FULL gallon of enamel from floor level once. I don't recall uttering any words I care to repeat here.

My dad took our young family on....ahem...."Vacation" most summers and in the trunk was his gold leaf kit. We'd stop at Banks, Law Offices, Insurance Companies and he'd do window and door art for the custys. His Gold Leaf jobs were scattered around Kansas, Oklahoma, and Eastern Colorado for decades afterward. We always came home with more money than we left with.

As I got older, I'd do some glass prep and various jobs he needed done. We'd go for a couple of weeks most summers and my Mom, sister, and I would do stuff, while my workaholic Dad thrilled passerby street traffic in little towns without signshops.  He'd get repeat calls for the next summer, for hours changes etc...months in advance.  Good times!  (And memories.....)

I still have my Dad's 50 year old Gold Leaf Sample Kit. All done by hand, with Mahlstick, on Super Cleaned glass, cleaned with Cake Bon Ami.

Oh, and IN REVERSE from inside the glass.

He didn't stripe either. Not really.

I still have brushes. What for, I'll never know....

[larryk]

Stan... did you know Blackie Meyers? An old sign painter from Hutchinson...... always had a cup of alcohol to dip his brushes in. At least he said it was alcohol but every once in a while he would take a sip of it.

[Frog]

Interestingly, these guys use One Shot enamel but add lacquer thinner.

[Itsa Little CrOoked]

Stan... did you know Blackie Meyers? An old sign painter from Hutchinson...... always had a cup of alcohol to dip his brushes in. At least he said it was alcohol but every once in a while he would take a sip of it.

Nope. But we used to do some work in Hutch with a guy or two, whose names I've forgotten. One was black, so it could be the same guy. I was pretty young.

I remember Steven Parrish showing up in our Signshop driveway one day, unannounced. He took my dad aside and said do you wanna learn how to do gold leaf? or something to that effect. UNbelievable, but true story. Just drove down from somewhere in Nebraska to almost Oklahoma and wandered in, I guess.

http://www.americansignmuseum.org/steven-h-parrish/  I wish the pics were high res, but the article was written in 1982.

So my dad became an apostle of sorts, of Steven Parrish. But back in the day, brushwork was a big, BIG deal. I doubt if I even have a single can of One Shot Enamel that isn't in brick form.

Lots of old signpainters had the reputation of keeping some booze handy. My dad never drank and that's how I was raised. I wish I'd have learned MORE of his habits, but I did manage to learn that one.

[Itsa Little CrOoked]

Interestingly, these guys use One Shot enamel but add lacquer thinner.

I don't remember ever doing that, but it would probably give the striping more "bite" into the gas tank. That may well completely negate my implication that re-do's are a piece of cake on simple striping like the Enfield tank in the video. The boo boo could be "etched" the substrate pretty quickly.

Andy, you certainly have enough gray hairs in your beard to remember stripers in their heyday. Their brushes were called "swords" and "daggers" weren't they??

[Frog]

Gray hairs, I have a-plenty, and though I grew up in the middle of the Kustom Kulture of SoCal digging the works of Barris and Jeffries,and Roth and "Von Dutch" Kenny Howard, even when I tried my hand at hand painting signs, I never picked up a pinstriping brush. I believe that they are squirrel hair, and yes, called swords.

I did have a couple of these though (never mastered)