How To Paint A Guitar Body

There’s many ways to paint a guitar body. There’s quite a few stages to even the simplest method and if you aren’t experienced at woodworking and spraypainting you’ll be on a steep learning curve. Find an old cheap guitar to work on for your first attempt and resign yourself to not getting a professional looking result the first time.

Visit Guitar Reranch to get the details on preparation, sanding, spraying, removing wiring, etc. Even if you don’t buy their products you should make use of their tutorial and forum because all I’m giving you is the basics so that you know what’s involved.

Speaking of products, if you don’t want to use a spray painting unit you can get aerosol cans of guitar paint in your favorite brand’s colors, or you can use car paint.

Your painting space should be somewhere it won’t matter if you get overspray on the walls, and it should have walls because wind is not good for spraypainting. But you NEED good ventilation so you don’t die for your art. Take the neck off your guitar and put a coathanger or something in one of the holes and hang it up. You can’t do a good spray job if you have to keep stopping and turning the guitar.

You will need to remove the lacquer from the guitar body and sand it smooth. Fill any holes and prepare yourself for your first guitar body painting experience. You will be putting some primer on next and then giving the guitar another sanding. You need to end up with a smooth, primed surface for the paint to stick to. If you don’t have that, don’t expect too much of your paint job.

You’ll probably be putting on about six coats of paint, the first one or two will look weird because of the color of the primer but keep applying coats till you get the color you want. There will be some hours drying time between coats. Finish with a coat of clear lacquer and hang your guitar body out to dry for thirty days.

This video gives you a taste of what you’ll be doing when you paint your guitar.