Good question! And hard to answer concisely. Sometimes I consider myself an artiste, but this time I was a little more lazy in the artistic department.

I found a photo of another guitar whose tiger stripes looked good to me. I did a perspective transform on the photo to get a flat-image view of the stripes. I traced the image with a bezier curve and did quite a bit of tweaking, and I lined up the stripes against an outline shape of my guitar.

In places where a stripe would wrap around the side of the guitar, I had the stripe change angles so that it is orthogonal to the edge of the guitar, so that the stripe would stay perpendicular to the edge. I created some offset curves parallel to the guitar body profile, offset by a distance of the guitar’s thickness to give me an idea of how far the stripes need to extend past the outline of the guitar to wrap around properly. I used the mirror of the image for the backside of the guitar.

I used a Cricut cutting machine (and the official Cricut software) to cut out the stripes onto an adhesive sheet. Then I put the adhesive sheet onto another adhesive sheet (something called a “transfer sheet”), to facilitate putting it onto the guitar. And I did the same thing for the back side. I then peeled off the transfer sheet and wrapped the remaining part around the sides with quite a bit of overlap for the front/back.

I originally was going to use the negative as a mask for painting (or maybe just paint the negative from the positive mask), but the original adhesive was such a great color already that I decided to just keep it as is and do a clear coat over that.