Masterclass for a 1st time stainer: Midnight Blue on a Paulownia Body

So you have a guitar kit for Christmas or your birthday, whatever and you want to figure out how to dye it. I'm going to call this my introduction to staining a guitar

body

. This is a Pawani

body

from China. Comes with a kit. a four piece body, this wood is quite nice, it's like Corinna Limaugh, only it's not as strong, it's grown on a plantation, so when they grow it they cut it very quickly. You will see many guitar bodies from China made with this. things, this one is in good condition, but you can see the different coloring from one piece to the next, so what we're going to do today is show you how to dye this because spraying is a whole other set of problems for you and If you put a dye on this and you apply an oil like real oil, you can get a pretty nice finished guitar body without as many problems, this body has a lot of grain and when you try to choose a color, I really want to focus on two color combinations that you can use as a brown base and then kind of a yellow orange red in those kind of tones, those colors work very well together or if you want to go for a more solid color, you would like a black base with

blue

or red or black with green.

You don't really want to mix the browns and the

blue

s or the browns and the reds, they don't always look that good, so I really want to take some sort of brown, yellow, red, some of those earthy colors, keep them together as you want to apply them, so a lot of

time

s in my videos you'll see me put on a dark base, sand part of the back and then add additional colors, that's where I would put a brown base, sand back and then do like a yellow or an orange or even a red on the side to blend it out.

If I wanted to go with a red, blue, purple, green, I would. It starts with a black base, so it's a bit of trial and error as you do it. I probably have 75 videos of different staining techniques with this coloring on this body. I'm going to wear a black one. To hide some of these a little better, if you had a color scheme that was a little more equal in terms of grain, you might go with a brown, red, or yellow, but with this dark color on one side versus the other. I'm going to choose a black and then add a color.

I don't know what color I'm going to use yet, but this is an interesting body, the back actually looks better than the front and I guess if I'm going to put a selection card on top, it doesn't really matter, but we'll finish this and show you how to do it. Today I'm using Angelus dyes. You can purchase them in these little three-ounce bottles through the link below. Get a little credit for that and I really enjoy using these dyes more than any other dye I've used for a couple bucks. These bottles last several bodies, so if you make a mistake on the sand and start over, you can do it, so just buy some of these smaller bottles, you will be much better off.

I buy the big bottles. I go through a lot of these things. I also have an old t-shirt cut up here. They are very easy to find. your basket or whatever, if they've been washed a lot, then they're not as blurry as when you rub this stain, so we're going to go with the black and you have to be careful when pouring over the body. especially if you have a very heavy piece that I have poured before, I'm not going to add filler to this, so this is an open poured wood, I don't like adding filler to my guitar bodies and this one I'm not going to do that too, many Guys say if you're going to spray paint and want a mirror smooth finish then I would definitely pour filler, but for this example today we're not going to do that additionally if you want to get these bodies you might want to sand them a little more, but since I have a stain and sanding anyway, I left it in and you can already see that I have a uniform color within the grain, which is perfect.

Adding two coats of black to these two coats really helps make all the wood even so it looks pretty good. We will dye the sides. The only problem with the Pawani is that it tears a lot, so it is soft and, as you do it. routing some

time

s bites this body actually probably could have used another round on the side it has a very small round like a 16 my favorite is usually like an octave you can see the tear out there and this thing is really soaking up the dye that I still like there will be a ton left over, I can tell it is absorbing it and actually this black with the grain looks great so you should put on those two coats because you can see inside the pores that the dye is not absorbing but this grain large and open reminds me a little of northern ash and the feeling of how big the pores are.

I think this would work well with the blue red. It's probably the only color you can wear black and brown with, but it becomes a bit. a little muddy with the black looks a lot better with the brown, so put this second coat on and we'll let it dry for a couple of hours, usually about four or five hours, sometimes I leave it overnight, it just depends, so that there are the two layers that you can see. I hid the dark spot there. I have a sanding mark. I'll clean it up while I go over this with the sander.

The body is in good condition. Let this dry well. So we let it dry for about six hours and you can see it. Pretty good, a couple spots where the stain didn't fully penetrate, but that's okay, we just have basic 320 grit sandpaper. I have my makita sander. If you want to do this by hand, you can. I prefer to do it. with the sander I used to do it that way, we'll put sand on it so we can vacuum it up, so I'm not going to remove as much, my pressure will be very light and essentially what I'm doing.

What we're going to do is make this in this teardrop shape on the front and back and we'll do the same color on the front and back, so I had a couple of scratches that I sanded down. The first thing we're going to do is come back with some black and just go over the spots that had to be sanded, so we saved the old rag and just applied it like this and here too, so it looked really good if you just sanded it and I left it, this is what a lot of guys do to match the black, so we're going to come back with a little bit of blue, it's the color I decided to use and we're not going to dilute it or anything, we're just going to make like a dark blue explosion which you can see as you apply it, you'll pick up a lot of black, sometimes too much blue becomes like a purple color, but I'll show you a trick to fix that so it's pretty wet to continue. you can see where it turns a little purple, we'll fix it after we let it dry so it's black and blue, go back to the other side, turn the rag over, so keep it in that teardrop pattern, I hid that darker pot through that. lighter now it's darker I hid that darker spot and then even on the front you can see I got the colors to blend together pretty well it's definitely more purple.

What we'll do is let this dry and we'll come back. with a little bit of steel wool and we should get it really close so we let it dry for 24 hours it's a little scratchy and stained and that's okay let's fix that like I said the blue can turn a little purple so I don't want to put too much blue and since I already have blue, what I can do is take a little bit of neutral and wash it, but the first thing is that the steel wool trick always solves a lot of problems, so this is o-o-o-o steel wool grade fine steel wool we're going to go in and start removing some of the color what it's going to do is make the blue more blue less purple, you can see, it takes out a lot of dye, we're I'm going to rub this all over the body.

Decent pressure. What this does is remove the top layer of color. You can see where it was a little stained. We level it there and go down here. Get a little out of this and really. This depends on how much you use and what you think it looks like, so it's more of a personal taste. You can see it's a big, open grain, and as I'm removing the color, it's pulling out a decent amount. Take some from up here. The trick is to try to level it out and make sure it looks good and that's a back and forth process, so here's a knot that I'm not going to be able to get much color out of, it's going to be slightly uneven.

Right there, but you can notice that I took some of those spots from the beginning, it's already much more uniform and it all depends on the look you're going for, so if you want a

midnight

blue, probably try to get the solid color. and leave it if you want a lighter blue, you're going to remove more of this. The good thing is that the color now looks pretty much the same, so we fixed that and using the darker color helped mask it, so what I want to do is go for a little bit more blue, but I'm not going to use the blue.

I'm going to use the neutral to move the colors a little. I usually don't like to dilute dyes. I feel like I've never really gotten great results, but with this and what I'm going to do, I can do what people say don't use steel wool. I've been using a steel container for 10 years, I guess I vacuum it. I have had excellent results. So here I have taken out most of the color. I'm going to try to keep it on this side a little longer. It looks really cool. I'm going to vacuum this same process towards the back.

Instead, we're going to I'm going to vacuum, so I really like the way the back looks, which is pretty slick. What we're going to do, I don't know, maybe we should leave the front. The back is definitely bluer than the front and I like that look. like I should add a little bit of neutral and blue right here and I can fix that so let's put our gloves on the way we're going to fix this is we're going to take the blue rag in neutral and put the neutral on top of the blue rag. and then rub it in like that, we won't have to do a custom mix, I'm just going to refresh the blue here, bring the blue back, not so much white, I still have a lot of black in this. but if we double this we could find the points that have more blue.

This is probably the trickiest part for you guys is getting this even, but this is a lot bluer. I have covered all the white spots. The trick here is just to go over, make sure you have cleaned, I have a stripe here that is more purple, due to the darker wood grain, we will hit it with steel wool one more time, that should do the trick, at least I have a color a little more uniform. and it has a lot less staining, this is just fading the black back, look, so the poor guy popped, poor guy, because you're doing this by hand instead of all the expensive spray equipment.

I like the way it looks, it looks amazing. I think all we have to do is grab some steel wool and we'll get the same look. The stains are pretty close gone, so let it dry and come back, give it a good clean, so we let it dry and actually, It looks pretty good, it's a little bit purple here, but we're going to do the steel wool again, just keep it in this corner a little bit if we can try to see if we can remove some of that purple, leave it more blue, it's a little bit.

It's hard to do that, that streak is going to cause some problems, so what we're going to do is just lighten it up a little bit with this, so for this example I'm not going to try to match the colors, I just wanted to show. You have two different looks, this one has more blue, this one has been sanded significantly more. The next step here is to take this outside and use sanding sealer and what the sanding sealer will do is set that color, so when you reapply oil, it doesn't bring those colors back and it makes a big mess, so we're going to go up with some Mohawk sanding sealer, we're going to put four coats on very clear, the first two coats are missing. coats and then the next two coats after that a little bit thicker and then with the fourth fifth coat let it dry for 24 hours and you can put whatever finish you want so for the finish of this body we're going to go with this thing called oil velvet, my brother makes furniture and he swears it's a lot more yellow than I want, but it's okay, just try this, you guys don't always have to use real oil, so let's just play with this one, I like real oil , it's what I use on a lot of my bodies, it's easy to use, but we'll try this because it's highly recommended, so the trick when you apply oil after you have the sanding sealer down is to just put a coat on and leave it, it will take the color a little bit, it's actually not that bad and let the oil soak in and seep in and seal it and then come back with another coat so that's a coat that picked up the Oil a little bit if I didn't put any sanding sealer on this already it would be a disaster and then we'll do it in the back.

I'll see that the back was a little bit lighter. I wanted to show you the difference, surprisingly the color. It evened out a little bit, maybe still a little lighter on the back, soaked in pretty well, we'll do the sides next, we didn't put the sanding sealer on it, all very well on the side, so you may have a little more color right now. It's an old t-shirt again, yeah, I think there's a lot of sealant on the sides, so it's getting a lot more color. So what happens if you don't use the stamp and you pick up all the color and you have a mess and we have to go into the garage because these things are going to stink and happy wife, happy life to you guys so it's pretty dark let's just flip front and back and wipe any drips off the sides, this is much brighterthan I imagined.

I'll try it with lots of drops on the side, wipe it off so you can see how much sealer it has. It works when I used the unsealed sides which picked up all that stain which is why you need to use the sanding sealer. Make sure you have all sides clean. It looks pretty good, yeah the back is definitely lighter than the On the front you can see how much difference you can make just by using that steel wool that you use.