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I want to paint my laptop. (PICS)

iconoplast

03:21 / 16.08.04

I bought a 12" powerbook, which is totally portable, but I feel like too much of a junior yuppie with it to take it anywhere.

Solution: Paint the fucker. applefritter.com has extensive notes on the kinds of paint that will stick to titanium.

Question: What do I paint?

I had this idea of an Andy-Warholized Che Guevara, but then I found out Warhol had done it already:

Then I thought about doing the same thing, but with Hans Baader:

But, while looking for the above image, I found the below:

...and now I sort of want to do something clever with the RAF (Red Army Faction) logo. Which is odd, since my first idea was a simple concentric circle RAF (Royal Air Force) Mod Logo.

o) Who's got a cool idea, and
o) Has anyone got a scan of 'barbelith' written in that alien 5D language? From issue 6 of counting to none, I think...

sleazenation

06:44 / 16.08.04

Don't do it to yourself. Its not big, or clever, and won't look good.

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06:51 / 16.08.04

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06:59 / 16.08.04

You don't have to be a brilliant artist to pull that one off either, it's just a matter of getting the hands done and the symbols on the left glove.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

08:08 / 16.08.04

I've got an idea - why don't you have a picture of Irwin Beelitz? Or you could use this handy image of Heinz Marcicz. It's aleady cropped for laptop dimenions.

Otherwise I've got some great images of casualties from various warzones.

Grey Area

11:53 / 16.08.04

If your powerbook is new, I'd check to see if painting it voids your warranty. Because as cool as a customised laptop is, a broken one Apple won't fix because of your artwork is probably not worth it.

But all common sense aside, Warren Ellis' logo for the Ministry of Space:

...is what I want to paint onto my laptop.

How are intending to deal with the logo on the cover? The one thing holding me back from painting my laptop cover is the fact that even if I were to manage to pry the Samsung logo off, there'd be a depression that would need careful filling with something. Leaving it in would just look silly.

w1rebaby

15:23 / 16.08.04

Go to Macskinz, order a blank skin, and paint that. Do not, whatever you do, paint your powerbook directly. First of all it will utterly fuck any resale value you might want to get out of it in the future. Secondly, paint + computer parts do not mix, and it's way to easy to make a mistake. Thirdly, you will probably get bored with the design, and it will chip and look bad after a while - this is a laptop we're talking about, they get scratched easily.

If you just paint a skin you can remove it when it looks nasty or you get tired of it or you want to sell it, much simpler.

Edit: just to make me look like a twat, Macskinz have stopped doing iBook/pbook skins for the moment. But I'd still wait until they start again.

Grey Area

16:06 / 16.08.04

Or you could try these people, whose product is, I assume, similar to the Macskins one. Although you can't paint this one, you have to pay them to print it for you. And you're still voiding your warranty if you take the screen casing off to mount the vinyl properly.

XXII:X:II = XXX

22:11 / 16.08.04

But all common sense aside, Warren Ellis' logo for the Ministry of Space:
...is what I want to paint onto my laptop.

wanker.

Hm? No, I didn't say anything.

/+,

sleazenation

22:47 / 16.08.04

To quote Carrie "they're all going to laugh at you" if you customize your laptop. And if you follow the suggestions in this thread on what to paint on it, they'd be damn right to laugh at you.

A customized laptop is the equivelent of an advertising hoarding - it is all to easy for the advert which it displays to become a monument to its owners ignorance and/or poor taste.

Triplets

23:02 / 16.08.04

Regrettable Juvenilia

23:09 / 16.08.04

sleaze - would they laugh even if was Eion's suggestion with the following three words beneath it: DO. YOU. SEE?

Like this:

DO YOU SEE?

Regrettable Juvenilia

23:11 / 16.08.04

They wouldn't laugh if it was an image of a terrorist, either. They would cry.

iconoplast

03:46 / 17.08.04

I want to do /something/.

I just don't know what - I saw a bunch of Che Guevara TShirts at the concert the other night, which I found sort of offensive - it lead to the warhol idea, which lead to the Baader idea (i.e., if Che, why not Hans?)...

But I think, all told, the Ministry of Space idea is probably my favorite so far, just because it's close to the Mod RAF logo, and because it looks easy to do.

I mean, it's either some kind of paintjob, or I'm going to have to go back to getting stickers from bands.

the cat's iao

04:06 / 17.08.04

I think it's a good idea to do something, especially if it's something you'd really like to do. Maybe you could make your own sticker(s) to put on it?

I keep having these images of the laptop the guy had in the episode of X-Files written by William Gibson. It had duct tape wrapped around it and looked like it had seen many a mile of hacking.

Perhaps you could paint on something else--cardstock, a piece of canvass, and then affix that to your laptop?

I don't really have any suggestions for images though. But I'd make it something that means something to me, if I was doing it. Design your own image or advert or whatever, eh?

Grey Area

06:42 / 17.08.04

A customized laptop is the equivelent of an advertising hoarding - it is all to easy for the advert which it displays to become a monument to its owners ignorance and/or poor taste.

So can I assume you have no clothes with prints or designs on them, you cover all your books and magazines and have no items in your house that are not magnolia coloured? Because quite frankly, not doing any of the things I have mentioned turn you into the same kind of taste whore you seem to think Iconoplast and myself are. After all, the choice of objects you have in your house, the choice of books you carry around and the choice of shirt you're wearing are %such% billboards to your personal ignorance and bad taste.

ONLY NICE THINGS

09:44 / 17.08.04

Dude, you totally can't even begin to appreciate the scale of the problem until you've seen Sleaze's shirts. They don't advertise anything, mind. Except possibly THE LUA.

sleazenation

21:12 / 17.08.04

I’m not quite sure where this in any way engages with what I wrote. This thread is about customizing laptops – where do my clothes come into it? My clothes aren’t customized and contain no advertising or logos, with the exception of a Canada Post shirt and a Montreal Fire department shirt which are both authentic and unaltered by me (unless of course you count the ink stain on the sleeve of the Canada Post shirt).

ONLY NICE THINGS

21:25 / 17.08.04

You're selling out, dude. You're selling out to ink.

Still, a picture of Che Guevara or Ulrike Meinhof isn't exactly *advertising*. Ministry of Space logo a bit more adverty, although "It's the quite fetching logo of a not very good comic that took a very long time to come out and was not worth the wait. You can get it in hardcover if you want to be profoundly disappointed at what you could have spent the money on" is not the greatest pitch in history...

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