His quest was to make certain that the 3-dimensional turtle is as dynamic someone sitting in the third balcony of a stadium as it is to someone standing right in front of the truck at a U.S. Hot Rod Monster Jam ® pit party.

"Many times the Bulldozer, El Toro Loco, and Blue Thunder trucks are painted by other people now. But usually for the first time, we like to have Jim do it because he simply has that eye for how paint or a design should fit on a vehicle," said Mike Wales, Sr. Director of Monster Truck Fleet.

Before Jim arrived Tom and the crew of Surfer's Custom Hot Rod in Plainfield, Ill, had base coated and sanded the body leaving it a pure primer white. "We've been up for 36 hours straight getting the truck ready for paint," commented Brian, part of Surfer's professional paint team.

The team made up of airbrush artist Jim McShea, Surfer's Custom Hot Rod owner Tom Stepenak, and paint mixologist Brian, Clear Channel Entertainment - Motor Sports' Eric Minger, and Mike Wales were in for a long night to meet their deadline.

Clear Channel Entertainment - Motor Sports in house artists, Jay Laws and Neil Vandenberg design many monster trucks. However, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle was a Mattel designed truck. Jay and Neil simply provided guidance creating a cohesive design between the Mattel toy artwork and the truck design artwork.

"We place the guides up here on the board: this is our inspiration," comments Tom while pointing to laminated sketches of the completed turtle's paint scheme.

Each paint scheme needs to be broken down into the base colors and the detail colors. The base application process for the turtle was made in several steps because the body separates into two main pieces - the head and the shell.

On the shell, the base color was a military green. Each segment of the shell was then touched with airbrushed white highlights and black lowlights. The shell, already one of the most contoured monster truck body pieces in existence, now simply leaps out and around. From the top of the stairs at Surfer's Custom Hot Rod it looked exactly like the Mattel inspired artwork.

The head of the truck needed two base colors: red and green, and neither Tom nor Jim would accept anything less than two coats of each color. The green was applied to the entire head section first. Each coat was allowed to dry before another coat was applied. To apply a layer of paint to one section of the body took approximately 45 minutes.

After the green was completely dry, it was covered (masked) with paper and the section of the shell that needed to be painted red was left exposed. The nose, body and the shell were then all painted.

According to Tom, "it's easier to paint everything red then go back and over paint with green what shouldn't be red." The masking will create more exact lines between the contrasting colors than simply placing them next to one another.

The time period from the first coat of red to the last coat of green was approximately four hours. The body was completely assembled and disassembled twice during the masking process to make certain that the masking lines matched perfectly to each of the three pieces of the body.

First the mask line is marked with a thin piece of thin blue tape. After the line is marked, whichever section is not to be painted is completed covered with paper, taking care to cover every crease, crevice, curve, and corner of the turtle.

After the turtle was dried Jim decided to do some airbrushing. Once the crew removed all the paper and Jim and Brian mixed up some paint for the airbrushes. Jim went to work first with black carving out the turtle's red bandana.

"I love these flat florescent lights. See how they perfectly highlight where I need to touch with the white because the body has so much detail?" Jim commented after he changed his paint from black to white and started working on the bandana's highlights.

Overnight the turtle's details were completed in the clean room. All that remained was to clear-coat the beast before revealing the paint to the artists who adapted Mattel's original toy design to better fit a monster truck body, Jay Laws and Neil Vanderberg.

Comments Neil Vanderberg, "I think it looks great. It looks really cool. Kids are going to go nuts over this truck when they see it."

Reviews were mixed from Sr. Director Of Operations Bill Easterly until he saw the mammoth turtle assembled and then his opinion changed. "I have never been so proud of a project this company delivered," said Bill.

What's next for the Turtle … a trip to Canada.

More About Automotive Painting
The paint that was used on the turtle is as close to standard PPG colors as possible. According to Eric Minger, "the further we get from standard PPG colors the harder it is for us to match if we have to do paint work and repairs anywhere in the country. Like these colors were chosen by Mattel, because of the toy, but we had to adjust them to as close to PPG as possible."

Automotive paint is urethane (like poly-urethane) based which means that is has rather toxic fumes and requires special ventilation systems to draw the fumes out of the regular breathing air of a shop like Surfer's Garage.

All the painting is done in a "clean room" with a hood ventilation system built into the walls and the ceiling and a hose installed on the floor. The fumes expelled are drawn directly back into the filter panels. They then are flushed out the back of the room through the back wall keeping the fumes away from the painters face and body. Each time paint is applied the concrete floor is sprayed with water.

"The floor needs to be wet for a couple of reasons," said Tom, "first of all it keeps any dust in that might be on the floor down, when you move, you will kick it up and it will be in the paint. The other one is if you do any work with metal flake, like we do, it really important that the floor is wet. Otherwise all that will be in your paint as well."

Vocabulary
Metal Flake: Metal flake are small bits of metal put into paint to create pearl or sparkle finishes.
PPG: PPG is a brand name of automotive paint. PPG stands for Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co.