Help with painting graphics.

[Dtimmerman89]

Hi, everyone. I am building a pretty wild and super detailed pulling truck and I have designed a paint scheme to match these crazy performance machines. The scheme is as follows... and I think it's going to be gorgeous and super flashy. Pearl purple will be the main body color over a white pearl base, a canted tear graphic, probably left in base pearl white, striped in pearl orange, and a pearl white and black checkered flag behind it with purple faded over to blend. I have some masks for the tear and flag graphics, but with the complexity of things, I am not quite sure where to start once the white pearl is laid down. Should I start with laying down the flag graphic first, then put the tear over top of it, cut the mask around the edge of the tear and paint in my black before doing the tear graphic? The illusion is to show the flag behind the graphic. I was always told to and always have been painting lightest to darkest, but I feel this will be painted more in terms of doing a lowrider type scheme where you paint the top layers first and the final color would be your body color. I guess I am not 100% on how to approach this and I really don't want to screw this body up ad I have already done a ton of scratch work to it. I am a little intimidated to just fly by the seat of my pants and experiment like I normally would.

[stitchdup]

do you have a pic of what your wanting it to look like? or something similar?

[Dtimmerman89]

This is all something I have imagined and I really have nothing to reference to, unless I were to draw it out. That is something I am quite capable of doing just for reference sake. I have researched for hours on end how to paint car graphics and didn't find anything of use to what I am trying to accomplish. 

[stitchdup]

If the overall colour is all going to be purple with the graphics under the method you suggest should work. I did this the way you said but its just stripes.

[Dtimmerman89]

That Impala is pretty killer looking. I really like it.

I guess what I'll do then is lay down my pearl white and let it cure for a couple days. I'll throw my tear graphic mask on, use 1mm masking tape around the edge of the graphic mask, then another round of 1mm mask around that to give a tape guide for masking the whole vehicle off. Pull the middle piece of mask out, shoot the orange in. Pull the rest of the mask off leaving the white graphic covered. Shoot some intercoat over orange before masking the orange off and layering over with the flag mask. Spray that in black, pull all of the masking off, mask over the white on the flag. I can then shoot the purple over the rest, Pull the white mask off and fade it in purple. This way, I can still go from lightest to darkest, minus the purple... and hopefully have the result I am after. 

[stitchdup]

10 minutes ago, Dtimmerman89 said:

That Impala is pretty killer looking. I really like it.

I guess what I'll do then is lay down my pearl white and let it cure for a couple days. I'll throw my tear graphic mask on, use 1mm masking tape around the edge of the graphic mask, then another round of 1mm mask around that to give a tape guide for masking the whole vehicle off. Pull the middle piece of mask out, shoot the orange in. Pull the rest of the mask off leaving the white graphic covered. Shoot some intercoat over orange before masking the orange off and layering over with the flag mask. Spray that in black, pull all of the masking off, mask over the white on the flag. I can then shoot the purple over the rest, Pull the white mask off and fade it in purple. This way, I can still go from lightest to darkest, minus the purple... and hopefully have the result I am after. 

good luck, i'll be watching for it

[Dtimmerman89]

Thank you.  I'll definitely be posting more soon.