I've had the idea to paint my cab for awhile now, but didn't know what exactly I wanted for an image. Once the idea do to an 8-bit metroid came to me, I made a mockup pic and immediately knew I had to go with it. Surprisingly, I couldn't find much information at all about people who've painted their cab covers, so I pretty much had to come up with my own method.
First, obviously I needed the metroid sprite itself. I had to do some measurements to see exactly how big each pixel was going to be on the grille (settled on 3/4" per px) and how big I wanted the whole thing overall. Once that was done, I popped the grille right off the cabinet, covered it in painter's tape and drew on a grid to make sure I'd get all the pixels nice and straight. Using a razor, I carefully cut out the pixels to be painted, making sure to not cut the mesh itself underneath. Then, it was just a matter of sectioning off each color and spray painting it. There was some bleed through drip effect from the white that I went over with a black marker to clean up the edges after all was said and done. I think it turned out pretty good - so far, most everyone who's seen it hasn't known what it is, but I don't care; I think it's awesome!
Some crappy progress shots taken with my crappy motorola camera phone -
Four Tens of naked Ampeg SVT in the flesh...
The grille with cut painter's tape, ready to be painted.
Closeup to show the grid
Sprayed white over all the colored areas so the red and green would show up a little better
Green for the outline, onto the red
There we go, let's hope this turns out okay...
Touching up the edges to fix the white bleed through
Has anyone else painted their cabs or music gear? Feel free to post them here...!
