Ladybird

How do you prove our paint works… you paint the chairman’s wife’s car!

Our Chairman’s wife wants her car to be decorated with spots to make it resemble a ladybird. To do this we needed 2 different size circle stencils, one that is 10cm in diameter and one that is 15cm in diameter. The variation in sizes would make it more accurate and life like. Not only are we going to be painting the black beetle with red spots, we decided to go fro broke and decided to paint the Chairman’s mother in law’s red VW golf with a Siamese cat and Mole stencil. The animal stencils are being used as her nickname is “moley” and she loves Siamese cat’s. As well as this she wanted something slightly more unusual on the back of her car so she could easily locate it in busy car parks.  

Painting the beetle was a battle against the elements, the constant wind made it hard to get a nice even finish on each circle. Then when the sun eventually did come out, the heat would cause the stencil to warp (we used a rather inferios stencil material) and stick to the layer of paint: meaning when we took it off we had to be extremely cautious as to not damage the paint. Originally, we tried to reuse each circle stencil as many times as we could, so we weren’t wasting any spares. However, the more we used each stencil the more it began to stretch and warp out of shape, meaning it was becoming harder to stick it on and have it still resemble a perfect circle. This shows in certain areas as you can see where circles begin to resemble a more oval shape. Thankfully though, because our paint is removable we could UNDO the imperfect ones and redo it until we had a satisfying result.

Overall the results of the cars were incredible; the spots on the beetle were spot on and received an overwhelming response. The Siamese cat and Mole on the back of the second car turned out brilliantly, even though I had my doubts about the stencil material we were using for the more detailed painting. We created a border around each of the fiddly stencils that allowed for much easier application and removal. This was only because the material we used for the stencil was far too thin… lesson learned. Thankfully we could perfectly apply the paint and remove the stencil without smudging the paint or creating a lip.