Unleashing my Creative Urges on our Car

Pimping up the Citroen: Part One

As I mentioned back in January, we own an old Citrooen ZX estate, and when we bought it Mr. B gave me free rein to do whatever I wanted to it creatively (What I didn’t tell him was that I used to love watching Pimp My Ride on MTV, and had loads of crazy ideas running round my head!).

Back in the summer, when the sun was shining and we were wearing shorts (seems a long time ago now) I decided that what the Citroen needed was a bit of paintwork. I consulted the boy.  His first reaction: “you can’t paint the car, it will look silly”. He then went quiet. The cogs were turning in his brain. “Well, we could paint Tintin and Snowy, or maybe James Bond…” He saw the look on my face and trailed off. We slept on it. The next morning the boy put on one of his favourite films, My Neighbour Totoro (we’re big fans of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli films), and we both looked at each other and said “Soot Sprites!” If you don’t know what Soot Sprites are, they are little anthropomorphic balls of soot that appear in a number of the Studio Ghibli films. They are quite endearing and, most importantly, easy to draw.

We decided to paint the Soot Sprites on the back of the car, and prepared the car by removing the name badges, sanding down all the paint and covering the windows and bumper with newspaper.

 

 

Once the car was prepared we spray painted the entire back panel silver. Three coats did the trick. Once that was dry I hand-painted all the Soot Sprites on, which took ages. Mr. B had the ingenious idea of breaking the Citroen badge in half and having two Soot Sprites painted to look like they were carrying it off. It still makes me laugh!

 

 

 

 

 

What do you think?

Look out for the next instalment of ‘Pimping the Citroen’, coming soon!