I am finally getting set up to do my first airbrush job on metal in a long time. This is a demo for selling my airbrush art in the area. I am going to spray the outer shell for a 69 Camaro door. I have a good auto body shop that is doing the clear coating for me after I paint my image.

I played with ideas in my head forever for this piece. I think like a woman and I need to think like a man for this job. Usually my clients will tell me exactly what they want so I needed to be masculine in choosing my subject matter for this sample. Maybe women hire people to airbrush their cars but I have not seen much of that yet.

I love doing wild cats so I went to istockphoto and bought an image of a cool cat taken in the Serengeti. Photos are very affordable on this site, I paid something like $6 for the perfect medium sized image. Then I incorporated sculls into my image, since that seems to be the most requested theme. I will leave flames for a later job, I am sure that will come. I have an old anatomy book so I scanned in pictures of human bones and sculls and did my image in photoshop.

I covered the door with an easy peel frisket. I must say finding the right frisket film is sometimes the hardest part. I chose one that did not have a drawable surface since I usually lift the drawing onto the sticky side of the frisket. But in this case the door is black so my graphite lines would not show up. I filmed up the frisket with an acrylic smear so that I can paint the image on the surface (it was too slick to hold the paint). They make frisket that has a filmy surface for this purpose but I am making do with what I have on hand.

The next step will be to cut along the outlines of the frisket film with my #11 exacto knife, very sharp. Then I will sit and study my piece to decide which pieces of frisket to lift first. I will only frisket once, you can never go back and re-frisket without leaving an outline around your objects. I could photo project this onto the frisket film to get the composition to the door. I am going to draw it freehand, as I enjoy the distortions and exaggerations that come into the drawing.