Busy in my workshop, like another of my namesake this time of year...

I'm talking about Kris Kringle, of course. Christmas is almost here, and it looks like I won't have SF 003 done by then, nor will we get the excellent Christmas morning swell that was predicted (although Sunday is shaping up nicely). In between baking cookies, shoveling snow out of the driveway (finally) and working on secret Christmas surprises, I was finally able to paint 003 today. I did another practice run on part of the broken board I found in the trash on 25th street after one of the big late-summer swells.

It's streaky, but I didn't want to waste paint, so I just decided to go with it, after do a final vacuum-run over the board. Oh yeah, I taped the stringer and lam spot yesterday. I vacuumed those especially well, so the tape would stick and no paint would (hopefully) bleed underneath.

So yeah, I vacuumed the board and got it all ready and decided to finally just go for it. Doing things like this for the first time always teeters between exciting and stressful for the first time. It's exciting because it's new, and no matter how it comes out I'm learning something. However, since this is airbrushing (which I've never done before) on a blank that I've worked to shape and care about, it's a little stressful because what if it gets messed up. But yeah, I'd say it's more on the exciting side, but still....

 

The first picture above is the first coat on the deck, the bottom is the second. I did the deck first because most of it will be eventually covered with wax, so I figured if anything needed to be worked out that would be the best place to start. You can see on the first coat it's a little uneven. You can see the overlap lines and everything. I was kind of wondering about it, but then I did the second coat and you can see it start to blend already.

Hey, smart guy, this is what happens when you get the bright idea to put the board (or whatever it is you happen to be spraying) too close to the surface underneath of it. The spray rebounded off the floor and made these lovely marks on the bottom. It ended up getting covered over fine, but good to keep in mind.

There's the bottom after two or three coats. Almost there, just one coat needed on each, but it was at this point I realized I would need more paint. I had gone through a lot more than I thought I would, probably because of the practice beforehand, as well as my never having done this, and not really knowing how much it would take in the first place. Fortunately, I was able to mix up some more and get a dead-on match. The spray job ended up coming out pretty clean, and even those pits in the blank from air-bubbles are barely noticeable, except where I tried to fill a couple with that sugar/resin mixture. I guess I didn't get all the resin off the foam, so it looks a little darker. Oh well, it's only a couple small spots near the tail.

At home in the music/paint-drying room until after Christmas, at least. I've read that with dark colors like this, you can run into major crystallization problems when you laminate the board. I'm hoping to avoid that so I'm going to let it dry for few days. I wouldn't have time until Saturday anyway, and the Sunday it looks like more waves. Maybe Sunday evening. For now, I'm just happy to be making progress on the board. Now, we'll see when I wake up and pull the tape off if the paint bled or not. But to wake up, I've got to go to sleep.