What Battle Dress Is

This latest calamity all began when two friends of ours (they being Adam and Mark) approached us (us being Lee and Lisa) with radically different requests.
Adam is a writer, designer and photographer in the science fiction/fantasy genre. Science fiction as in the future, fantasy as in the girls aren't wearing many clothes and genre as in it's a theme. Anyway we had actually helped him with photo shoots for reference shots on a comic book/graphic novel he was/is working on. (see AdamChilson.com)
Eventually the topic of custom makeup for the models was broached and a plan for "painting the costumes" on to the women was devised. (We had an airbrush setup already, bare with me).

At the same time Mark, remember Mark, bought a Nascar helmet off of Ebay. He had this strange notion that he was going to drive a car in some demolition derbies over the summer. He asked us if we could design and paint a cool image onto this helmet for these events (again the airbrush would be useful).

The combination of these two unrelated but freakishly odd requests snapped my wife, Lisa, into an arts and crafts frenzy that has led to a serious drop in our bank account, a sharp rise in the stuff filling up the shop space, a severe lack of weekend time - and the photos that are in the gallery.

This arrangement continued for quite a while, through various employers (for Lee) and relatively steady employment for Lisa.

Then in the early part of 2005 Lisa's left arm began to ache, this persisted and became worse. My poor wife was diagnosed with a condition that required surgery on her shoulder. Through the time taken by the operation and the recovery, on disability, the company that she was working for as an operations manager; combined two departments and made her job go away.

Ergo and so forth the official creation and desperate strides taken to make Battledress Paint and Body a real, viable and highly profitable enterprise.

Well, it's real so far.

8-20-2003

Only one model showed up for the test paint on Saturday. It was Lisa S. it is looking like I’m creating a site dedicated to Lisa S. What can I say, she’s dependable, shows up on time and hasn’t left us hanging yet. Showing up is half the battle most of the time.

No pithy comments today, just tired.

8-13-2003

Running commentary, hmm. A better term would be a stumbling commentary, or bumbling commentary, you get the point.

I refuse to call this a blog or weblog because that sounds too much like a diary and I don’t think that I’m going to be sharing my deepest feelings here. If I want real abuse I can talk to my family and friends. There’s pain.

By now I have most of the “juicy” stuff up. Take that as you will. I’m working on the odd stuff now. Those little projects that have the potential to go “Hey that’s cool” but usually end up as “What were you thinking?”

My sister-in-law is coming in this weekend (16th) and we are doing a test paint for the American Legion’s Annual Jazz Festival in Newport Beach. The theme of the paint is military uniforms, (American Legion, we’re at war, service men, who’d have guessed that theme) there will be some slight modifications, trust me. Hopefully everything will go well and I’ll have some shots of the completed outfits up before the actual Festival on the 23rd, you’ll have to wait on the how to’s for a while. Not like it matters, I’ve only got 40 hits on the site so far. Guess I should publicize it a bit. Well, maybe tomorrow.

4-20 something - 2006

Okay, now this all started when Lisa and I went to the Quick Throttle Expo down at the Orange County Fairgrounds on the Easter weekend. The show started on Friday which was a holiday for some people but the weather was cold and raining. Not a good start. We put the bike, Sure Leave, into the show and went to enjoy the days events.
Remember the rain I mentioned, well that put quite a damper on the above events. Soooo Lisa was bored. Not a good thing.
After walking the building for the 40th time Lisa started talking to Kim Qualls of Kim Qualls Photography (mobildigitalpics.com) who was having a terrible time selling her photos on a bike and was more than happy to complain about the situation. Lisa (being bored) offered to paint one of her models the next day. She quickly agreed.
And we were off.
The next day, Saturday, Lisa brought her kit and painted the young lady. The weather was much better and we created quite a crowd in the back corner where we were.
Long story shortened - girl looked good - security didn't like the "topless" look - added real shirt - killed the effect (duh). Rep from a graphic company saw us - Shannon of rebelgraphics and was impressed by the amount of people that stopped looked and return later to see how it was going, this was before the security freaked.
He invited us to share their booth at the World Tattoo Tour in Anehiem to see if we could generate some foot traffic past the location. Now in theory this would be a great thing for both us and them, but practice and theory diverge from time to time.
The show was in direct competition with a show in Ontario, so both were dead.
Hey the experience was worth at least three days of our lives, well, that's what it cost.
On the bright side, we did meet some truely excellent people. Both vendors and participants.

It's officially 6-6-6. Is anyone still out there. Personally I'm more afraid of 6-8-6 but that's just me.
Got Fish's bike done and he seemed to be happy. Larry's firewoman turned out quite nice and he's happy enough to talk about having more work done. Can't complain about that. Those are the clients you want, the ones that come back. Makes us happy too that we could capture someone else's wants on a machine.
Jenny got us the shot at the magazine spread, I tell you she's a trooper. Mitzi is the photog that agreed to take the shots and we are all hoping for the best. We all did it on spec hoping that the publicity takes us up the next rung on that ladder.
Tell you how good these paints Lisa does are. This is how it appeared to us, Mitzi's husband was talking to Jenny after the shoot. He hadn't been there for the process of the paint, he showed up after it was over and before she cleaned up. Anyway their convesation ended she turned around and walked to the shower and his jaw seemed to drop. He hadn't realized that the complete outfit was an illusion. Her fanny was not illusioned.
Ah, the little things in life that make it all worthwhile.
Finally got published in RoadBike Magazine's July issue. That feels pretty cool. We've been in Quickthrottle a few times but we hit all the shows in the area so they are bound to cover us. We win a lot of trophies in the local shows.
See you all later. I write more better when I'm a bit tipsi, at least I'm more entertaining.
Have fun and drive safe.

This is a brief chronology of how the hell this happened.		Running Commentary