Whenever I pull up to car shows, car meets,
wherever, honestly. Gas stations,
it honestly doesn't even matter.
The response every single time is,
"Yo, who did your wrap?"
And I tell them it's spray paint,
and then their head literally just explodes.
I've gotten all kinds of responses.
"Auto Modellista," yeah, the "Borderlands,"
definitely I get that all the time.
At the end of the day, it's "Initial D"-themed manga,
like, kind of idea is where it came from.
I would say 90% of the cars that you see on my page
are just off the top of my head.
I just walk up. I see where all the shading
and everything needs to be already,
just when the car is sitting there.
I can't really explain it.
Yo, what's up, guys?
My name's Kyle, aka Kbmerone.
You can find me on Instagram @kbmerone.
I'm a street artist from Florida,
and today we have a RX-7 in the shop
we're going to be giving a manga makeover.
So, let me walk you through the steps.
The first step is we had to rip off the wrap.
They weren't happy with the wrap.
It was lifting in places.
At that point, we taped off the car
to protect moldings and stuff like that,
then started sanding it.
We just sand it all down,
make sure there's no gloss showing.
It's gotta be frosty.
You want the paint to stick.
And from that point, we just lay down the paint
and go from there.
A lot of people online, they say, like,
"Oh, you didn't even prime it,
and you didn't even do this,
or you didn't even do that."
But I'm using graffiti spray paint,
and it's made to go on anything, basically.
When it comes to that specific style spray paint,
it's, like, a winterproof, weatherproof,
everything you can think of,
it promotes it on the side of the can.
So they're not lying.
People request that they want a specific color,
but I also get the people that are just like,
"Yo, I just want you to do whatever you want
to this thing and make it look sick."
The monster-ish kind of purple that's on the car,
the one that's really bright, I started with that.
And I started on the hood,
and I just started sectioning off areas
that needed to be that specific color,
and I colored them all in.
And then I came back with the dark purple,
and then I started doing the heavy shading
where it needed to be just to give it
the look like light's hitting it at all times,
even though light's not hitting it.
I can see where the shading
needs to be on the car already,
so I'm just painting the shading,
freestyle painting the shading in.
Most of my passes on the car are one pass.
Whenever I do the shading, I only touch it once.
I lay it down, and then I don't touch it anymore.
It's done.
The shading is just random.
It's where I think it needs to be.
It's really all about how you hold the can
and how much pressure you put onto the tip.
And then I came back with
a light purple that was even lighter,
and I started doing some highlights
kind of on the fenders,
and then I even came back with a white on top of that
to make that highlight look even more realistic.
Which part of the car I'm spraying on
depends on how I hold my can to prevent overspray
from landing on different parts of the car.
You don't want to do too much,
because you put too much paint on the car,
it'll start building up,
clear coat is more likely to react with it
because the paint might be too heavy,
and then it's still letting out gases
and stuff underneath.
And then I came in with black
down on the very bottom of the car,
coming out the fenders too, to make it look like
there's a lot of definition in the fenders.
After I'd laid down all of the actual spray paint,
I take my marker, and then I go down all the body lines.
I go around all the lights.
If there's a logo on the car or anything like that,
it gets markered to make it look like it's drawn,
like it's that cartoon effect.
I was looking at actual references
from "Initial D" on an FD RX-7.
So I pretty much copied lines to the T
that were in the image.
The paint pens that I do use,
they're just made for graffiti writing.
They're chisel tip,
which allow you to get cool strokes,
depending on which way you hold it.
I can see the light hitting on the car
and where it starts getting darker,
and that's normally about where you need to draw your lines.
The only thing you do have to think about
is the motion marks and little hashes and dashes,
wherever you want to put those, if you want to put them.
On this specific car we left some carbon fiber showing,
so where the carbon fiber was still showing,
I switched up the outline color.
Instead of using black that was going over the purple,
I switched it to white.
That way it would just give it a little bit more
of a wow factor.
The manga style of art is sketchy.
It's not solid, just, you know, "Family Guy" cartoon.
The customers that come to me, they already know
it's not perfect. Art's not perfect.
So I never know if I'm really finished or not.
I've learned more,
like, in life, up to this point,
that less is more.
The last thing that we do after
laying down all the paint and the lines,
or all the artwork, I guess,
I have a good buddy that does paint jobs.
He comes in and lays down all my clear-coat jobs.
He mixes pearls in them.
If you look closely,
especially on the carbon fiber in the light,
you can see there's a purple pearl in the car
mixed into the clear coat.
So, I offer no finish
if you just want straight-up paint.
I offer one coat, a two coat,
and then I offer a three coat.
If you get a full three-coat paint job from me,
it's glassy. It looks like glass.
It's always satisfying to see the clear coat go on.
That's like the cherry on top every time.
I don't think anybody's really tried
to combine it with clear coat.
I have not really ever seen that.
So, once you put the clear coat over the paint job,
it's a real paint job, and it looks good.
I'm a single-man team for the most part right now.
I'm just an artist.
I don't do cars and bodywork and stuff like that.
I just wanted to do graffiti on cars.
I'd say that street art in my life,
it gives me my living. I live off of it.
It's literally my job, which I never thought it would be.
It gives me happiness to see a crap wall
or car turn into a piece of work.