Written By Steven Craig

ARTIST PROFILE

STEVEN CRAIG

DATA

Steven Craig is the owner and head painter of SKC CUSTOMZ in Lake Havasu City, AZ. In the past Steven has won the House of Kolor Prestigeous Painter Award and was a 1st Place winner of Dupont's Hot Hues Awards. He most  recently was awarded the Matrix System's FX Grand Prize Award. Steve paints a wide range
of jobs from guitars to large off shore boats. Visit  his web site at

Airbrush : Iwata HP-BH, Custom Micron B
Spray Guns: Iwata LPH400 ,Iwata LPH300, Iwata LPH-80
Paint Media: PPG, Xotic Colours, Dupont and Matrix Systems
Surface Media: Everything I can get paint to stick to.
Masking : R-Tape and 3M Masking Tapes
Projector: Artograph
Lighting : Natural and Florescent. Spray-Line and Spray King Paint Booths
Plotter: Roland Camm-1

"Vector Pinstripe"

 Pre-designed pinstripe vector art is available on cd-rom by such artists as Steve Kafka or through websites on the Internet. The best I have found so far is www.vectorart.com . They have a huge selection of designs which can be purchased individually. I personally like that feature because you can browse their entire selection and only purchase the design that fits your project.

 For this article, I'm going to use CorelDraw X3. The past versions of CorelDraw had many drawbacks to the program when creating vectors. Corel has designed X3 with the Signmaking industry in mind and has simplified the tools to create vector images. Corel X3 can open any vector file (i.e. eps, ai) with no glitches. Start by going to the dropdown "File" menu and click on "Import". Locate the file you want to open that is either on cd-rom or saved in  your computer.

 Once you have chosen the file to be imported, a window will pop up for "Import Options". Choose "Curves" and click "OK". Converting to "Curves" creates a vector images that can be edited by creating "Nodes". Nodes are a series of positions plotted on a grid (your screen or page) and then connected with lines. Something like a highly sophisticated "connect the dots" puzzle, with "Nodes" in-place of dots.  

 Drag open a box with the Pick Tool to import the image. The image can either be resized at this point or done in whatever plotter software you are using.

 Some files may need a little clean-up work done to them. Seldom does any corrections need to be done to a purchased vector but, if they do, you can do adjustments by editing the nodes and paths. Go to the View menu, when the dropdown box appears, select Wireframe.

 Wireframe removes any Fill colors. What you see here are the lpaths that the plotter will following when cutting the spray mask. To give the illusion that the pinstripes were done by hand, try to maintain a 1/16" width. Larger pinstripes my go up to but shouldn't exceed 1/8" in width.

  Old School Pinstriping is an art form all in its own. Made famous by artist such as Von Dutch, the look of scroll pinstriping can enhance the look of any paint job. The popularity of intricate artistic pinstripes that reflect the old hot rod days is rapidly growing. The problem is that for years it was considered a dying art form and only a talented handful of people pursued careers in doing it. The age of computers has changed many industries and now offers assistance to the custom paint field. Some of the master pinstripers of today have designed vector images so anyone can produce the Old School look. These pre-designed images can be manipulated and scaled to fit almost any project by using graphic editing software like CorelDraw X3.  For years, customers thought I was among those who could do fancy pinstriping. I almost hate to tell my secret ,but this article shows how I've been doing it. I've never had the time or patience to learn this art form and in the custom paint industry, you want to produce the best possible final product that you can. Ours is also a industry where time-is-money. So, a little Computer Assistance doesn't hurt and gets the job done!

 Old School Pinstripes Made Easy