Paint is justifilbly a mess, so the goal was to paint the car in fashion only achievable by paint. Oh, and tell a cool story at the same time. That’s important too.
The design originated with the painting techniques of Seurat and Monet. Both paint using very small dots to take advantage of an effect called optical mixing. When you look at a distance the shapes appear to take on one color, but up close the small dots that compose the canvas become more individually separable. Their pieces have two completely different reads based on the distance at which you view them. I figured these varied dots could give us a watery and city vibe perfect for LA.
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Achieving this look required a paint gun, so we ordered one. Paint guns are designed to spray smooth streams of air to create even coats of paint. The gun sips paint from a canister using a straw. Much like drinking from an empty juice box, if the straw takes in both air and paint, it’ll emit a choppy flow. The trick was to constantly adjust the angle of the gun to keep this effect going.
The paint needed some changes paint as well. To make my life simple, I used only blue and white paint as opposed to all three of the primary colors. Adding urethane thinned down the paint too, increasing the size of the splatter. By the time I had the right ratios, I ran out of uthreane, and had to resort to a poop mix of organic solvents - isopropyl alcohol, kerosene, acetone - to actually finish the car. This was a risky move as they evaporate much slower than urethane, but it turned out ok.
You can see the effect at play here. I painted with a thinner substrate on the lower layers and just kept the white and blue on the topmost layers thin.
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I’m from Ohio and nothing reminds me of that fact like palm trees. They scream LA.
After the team saw them in a concept drawing, they encrouraged me in include them, so we sort of morphed the splatter ocean look into a starry night. The RW endplates, the side panels, and the nose cone were painted with the gun. The rest was with a plastic fork - literally cub scouts with sling shots. They distribute FAR less paint than the gun which, at times, feels like using flamethrower to light a candle. Below is the final iteration of the render done before painting (with some missing decals).
Instead of using vinyl, the black areas are bare carbon. Team areo works incredibly on not only the shaping of the parts for drag, downforce and so on, but also the quality of manufactured parts. In addition to the look being preferable it is a great way to show off their work.
The trick with the bare carbon “decals” this is that the positions have to be locked in before painting and they can’t be changed. I avoided using pure white for the sponsors because it is too strong and opted instead for a baby blue. The yellow is a summer lemon/mango color. On its own it is more Berkeley than UCLA, but because of is minimal usage it adds some much needed warm to the flood of blue.
We were also able to lock in a darker chassis color to basically get it out of the way (sorry Alex) and light blue suspension components to blend against the paint (sorry Parth).
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Timeline
It took probably took a 8 multi hour days of work. I wish we kept better track but the guesstimate is 8 hours of work over 7 days. This includes the painting but also the sanding and cleaning and all of that. We started on the 23rd of May and crunched over the next 2.5 weeks. Not recommended. Had I been more forward with the design this probably could’ve been avoided a little bit, but we were able to paint in larger batches as more of areo came together (which save alotta time). Ideally it would be a 2/3 session deal, to paint each coat in one go (primer/base/clear) with 24hrs in between each.
Because our vinyl is quite thick, it basically needs to be recut by hand. This is an on par time commitment with the paint but many people can work on it. Kevin, Luke, and Matt were able to work on vinyl stuff a couple times on their own which was great. Next year I’m curious if different vinyl could help us in this regard.
I had a lot of support in making this. Thanks to the areo and the directors for being trusting and supportive and chassis and suspension for not making their parts pink. Special thanks to Luke, Matt, and Kevin for assisting with the design and manufacturing. This wouldn’t have been possible without all y’all.