Painting my Laptop

I'm currently in the process of painting my laptop, an IBM ThinkPad R40e.  As it only has Linux installed on it (I do all of my Windows based work on my Desktop PC) I decided to paint it in a Linux theme.

The laptop is made from a slightly textured, black, plastic.  The lid is flat (and pretty scratched), which makes it ideal for painting.

Ultimatley I plan to paint most of the laptop, but to start with I decided to only paint 2 images on the lid.  To do this I made some stencils and used spray paint.  The stencils were made from the following 2 images (follow the links to see the original images).

http://www.apsoft.com/~pedward/li/

http://www.isc.tamu.edu/~lewing/linux/

I then performed an edge detect in Paint Shop Pro, which gave me the outlines of the images.

These were then printed onto masking film and cutout with a scapel blade.

The type of paint I used was Humbrol Spray Paint, which takes around 24 hours to dry.  The paint is quite cheap (£2.50 per can) and goes on without any problems.  The only preperation that the lid needed before painting was cleaning. However, some laptops might need sanding before hand.

To see pictures of the individual steps click here (this link contains 769KB of images).

At some point in the future I plan to paint the rest of the lid as well as the area around the keyboard and the LCD.  When I do, I'll update this page.