TS1 - The Original Thinskull Guitar
Let me introduce you to TS1. This guitar was originally an old 80's Kramer owned by my best friend Robert Wallace. We were sitting around one day in 2001 and started brainstorming about what to do to this guitar, which was totally stripped of parts. We decided to make it look like some kind of freaky evil looking skull and planned it out. I took it home and started working on it, and finished the painting in early 2002. I reassembled and totally rewired it this past spring, and now TS1 is finally a living beast.
The black areas you see on the face of the guitar are actually carved into the wood about 1/8 of an inch, and the areas around the eye sockets and cheekbone areas were built up with wood putty to give it some contour.
The cracked paint job was achieved by painting the entire body gloss black, then after it dried, I masked off all of the areas that were to remain black and the went over the uncovered areas with a gray primer. After a while, the primer, which doesn't adhere that well to gloss paint, started to seperate, especially around the contours. These next shots show off the contours nicely.
The back of the guitar was the easiest part. Just black. I did make a control cavity cover out of clear plexiglass so you could see all of my shitty soldering.
For the headstock, we wanted to put the word "Thinskull" where the guitar's logo would normally be. In order to avoid doing anything simple, we wanted that contoured as well. So what I did was print out "THINSKULL" in the appropriate font and size, cut the letters out and used Elmer's glue to make the contour. The glue stops at the edge of the paper and starts to build up in the center. After the letters were hardened, I glued them to the headstock, painted the entire thing black, then used red paint to do the letters before clear-coating it.
Well, there it is! Go check the others out!
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