STENCILLED 730S SHILOH 6 AND 12 STRING DREADNOUGHTS

These twins were built for a Studio California repeat customer who always has ideas for unusual builds. He owns one of our 3615 long-neck Rickenbacker bass conversions, as well as this wild pair of dreadnoughts. First of  his custom builds  to be ordered, quite a few years back, was a 730S Shiloh 6-string in natural finish. He wanted something "really different" done with the top in terms of a graphic, so we designed and executed an "Acanthus" leaf pattern, to evoke the tooled leather cover that Elvis had on his own Martin dreadnought. The "Acanthus" pattern was first created in Adobe Illustrator, then cut on our CNC vinyl cutter, laid onto the finished guitar, and used as a mask for the 2-color subtle shading. 

A few years passed (5, perhaps?), and he decided he wanted a 12 to go with the 6. This 12-string version uses the same pattern, but rendered in a much more flamboyant way. We started with a Deep Amber Fireglo burst with a very amber center, laid the Acanthus pattern on the top, just like before, but sprayed a negative shadow onto the burst, using two color palettes--a red and a transparent black. Not to be satisfied with a mere color shift, we also reversed the pattern positive-for-negative, and sprayed an aura around the leaves in a matte clear, so the leaves reflect light while the edges around them show a diffused matte glow. Complicated, hey? Just see the photos below. Some hand-rendered highlights were added here and there in Prismacolor pencil before clear coating. Finally, sides and back were treated to a deep brown shading along the edges of the binding.

These guitars are mostly used for recording. My customer’s comments on the 6 as he first plugged in the LR Baggs "Anthem" dual element pickup system, are in a video on our "Acoustic Sound Samples" page.