Building guitars can be fun and relatively easy. There’s different levels of quality with guitar kits.
This kit in particular wasn’t all that great to begin with. The hardware was poor quality. The pickups were cheesy. The kit gathered dust for a long time.
One day my daughter was trying to figure out what to do for a middle school art project. I showed her the kit body as a potential canvas. Hence, the Buberry was born.
I didn’t provide any direction in terms of art, other than I was hoping for something in blue.
She showed me her artwork a few weeks later, and it was a keeper. The front has some brushwork squares. The brushwork squares are much harder to paint than I thought. I found that out when I tried to do one myself.
And the back has a tree that she sketched out in pencil.
Once she was done, I was thinking about how I was going to clear coat it.
Polyurethane was an option, but can be a bit unruly with air bubbles and dust in the garage, and I didn’t want to tarnish the artwork.
So I looked around for someone to do a professional clear coat job, and found Pat Wilkins. He clear coated it and it came to life.
Then I was rolling with it, so I ditched the original hardware that came with the kit, and went all in upgrading to Gotoh hardware.
Luthier Mike Lipe (rest in peace) also helped me. He poured lead into the pickup cavities, and sold me a set of special hand wound single coil pickups. The pickups came from a friend of his who is a scientist, but winds pickups occasionally for fun. There’s spec’d out as vintage strat single coils. Mike also helped me on parts of the setup. The kit wasn’t tight – the neck and body weren’t the greatest quality.
All in all it came together. But it’s not the best playing guitar by any stretch. Ultimately, I decided to move the pickups over to the Ibanez RG-550 I’m working on.
Headstock front. Brushstrokes similar to the body were used. 
Swirls of blue streaks. 
Artist signature.