Painted Hog's Skull

This winter, I stuffed a pig's head for a friend's short movie. This experience in taxidermy didn't turn out very well; I didn't degrease the skin correctly so it didn't cure fully. However, it worked great for my friend's movie;

As a result, I had a pig's skull laying in my basement. I finally used it in a sculpture made for a class in college:
Giorgio by *ars-anima on deviantART

At the end of college, I couldn't bring that tall thing home, so I just ripped off the skull and threw the rest away.

I was once again stuck with that skull, without knowing what to do with it.

Inspirationg struck two days ago while I was bored out of my skull (HAHA A PUN! YES! I ROCK!). This skull SHALL BE PAINTED, proclaimed-I!

Thus I began ripping all the lights, silicone, wire and urethane out of it.

This done, I started painting the skull without any sketch or whatever. I used Delta craft paints; the opacity and fluidity of a quality craft paint makes it perfect for such a job. I didn't try to follow any ritual or traditional pattern; I just painted following as much as I could the natural shape of the skull. (sorry if you have to turn your head 90°, I'm too lazy to rotate the pictures)

I tried to use mainly bright colours to give it a gipsy or voodoo appearance; of course, just a few icons painted on leaving lots of the natural color, or a darker theme would look just as good if not better.

Once the main painting job was done, I sanded the hell out of the skull using a coarse grain sandpaper, and also a very fine one to give it a polished with us texture. Afterwards, I applied a nice coat of stain made of coffee, acrylic paints, white glue and varnish. Wood stain followed with a coat of varnish would have worked just as good if not better, but I didn't have any at hand.

There ya go!

old, dirty, and ready to hang!

If you wish to try your hand at skull painting, you can find already clean skulls on Ebay, or go take a look at The Bone Room or Skulls Unlimited. Be warned though that professionally cleaned bones tended to be expensive; If you're not squeamish, cleaning the skulls of roadkill or of heads bought at a slaughterhouse is a damn cheap option. The whole hog's head I used, who's meat was turned into great headcheese by my wonderful mom, cost just 10$ at the slaughterhouse.

Refinishing your guitar

Ok, so you've got an old dented, scratched, sticker covered guitar. And that guitar cries, sometimes, at night. Cries because it wishes it could be beautiful. Cries because you neglected its looks for too long. It's time to take the matter in your own hands and refinish that baby.

Before I go on, however, I must warn you; there's danger involved.

DISCLAIMER: REFINISHING YOUR GUITAR MIGHT RUIN IT. DON'T DO IT UNLESS YOU'RE SURE OF WHAT YOU'RE DOING. I WON'T BE RESPONSIBLE FOR DESTROYED INSTRUMENTS.

thanks!

No let's go ahead.

I started out with a 2 year old Epiphone Les Paul Special II. It's a 200$ guitar, so I wasn't very afraid to break it. I wanted to give it a bit of personality so I painted some swallows on it with craft paint.

bad idea.

To make this story short, let's just say that I felt a refinishing was necessary.



What I did was that I stripped off the body of everything. I took off the strings, unbolted the neck, screwed out the electronics. It may seem daunting but it's quite a simple task. At the end of this post, I included links to websites that might help you around with this.

Once this was done, I used paint stripper to remove the paint, and sanded the wood very well, until it was as smooth as a casket. Afterwards, the painting begins.

In my case, I stained the wood instead of giving it an uniform color. I used acrylic washes instead of commercial wood stain; it doesn't work as well but it did it's job.



Afterwards, I painted the designs on using high viscosity acrylic paints (craft paints would work just as well)



Once the paint was dry, the real work begun.

Over the course of a few days, I applied a huge number of coats of gloss spray varnish. The trick here is to apply very thin coats, so the varnish doesn't scratch off easily and you don't end up with a huge amount of dripping. I applied a whole can of varnish this way, and should have applied a few coats more, but I didn't seek perfection.

Once the varnish was applied, it had to dry for a week or two to harden fully and lose it's stickyness.

The varnish dry, I wet sanded it with different grits of sandpaper. I started out with a grit of 220, and progressed gradually to a grit of 1500. It is important to sand until the pebbled texture of the varnish is smoothed out.

Afterwards, the elbow grease came in. Using a polishing compound and a rag, I polished my guitar until it got all shiny, by hand. A buffing wheel would have been terribly helpfull, but the results were great anyways.





REFERENCE:
If you're interested in modifying your guitar, go take a look on these webpages. They were really helpfull.

Project Guitar
Paint your Electric Guitar