Graffiti Paint Job on My 356

Last night, Doctor Ziso painted my 1964 Porsche 356 SC:

To the purists screaming at their screen, relax, there’s precedence for this: Janis Joplin custom painted her SC too. Anyhoo, lemme explain how we got to this point.

About a year ago, I bought this 1964 Porsche 356 SC from a man in the San Francisco area. His wife had owned it since the 1970s, daily drove it just like any other car, and put about 145K miles on it. In the 1990s, she bought a convertible, parked this SC in the garage, and … never drove it again. It sat in a garage for decades.

When I bought it, I had Gaudin Classic redo the mechanicals: rebuilt engine, new fuel tank, suspension, brakes, etc. It drives great, and it’s really fast for a car that didn’t come with seatbelts. (We’re having seatbelts made for it, but that’s another story.)

I left the outside exactly as-is because it told a great story. It looked like a 1964 car, as opposed to the pristine trailer queen 356s that I usually see. However, there was a risk: the clear coat was completely gone in many spots on the car. You could literally run your finger over the roof and get a blue stain on your finger. The paint simply wouldn’t last much longer in that state.

So I took it to Purple Flare Agency, the wrap company that I used for the Defender and the Speedster replica, and asked Ivan what it would take to preserve the paint as-is. Putting clear protective film on the car would have run about $8-10K, which was high enough that it would make more financial sense to just repaint the car.

Ivan suggested, why not just wrap it for now? Wraps aren’t transparent, so the paint wouldn’t be visible, but wraps are way cheaper. Plus, we could do something wild with the exterior. As soon as he suggested wrapping it, Yves and I realized, this was our chance to do something really wild.

Where my inspiration came from

I love the classic Gulf livery as seen on the 1970 Porsche 917:

Just iconic:

And lately, I’ve also loved the Initial D manga style paint jobs done by Kyle Montero, aka kbmerone:

I decided to mash those two things together and do a graffiti version of the Gulf livery. We had Purple Flare wrap the 356 with a base color of light blue to get started:

And then it was time to get a graffiti professional involved.

The artist: Doctor Ziso, aka doctorziso37.

He’s a talented graffiti artist who’s done a lot of work in Vegas. If you’ve been downtown and seen a huge murals featuring a heart, that’s him. He did a design to make sure we were on the same page:

And then he prepped the 356 in my garage:

And spray painted it live at the Cars in the Arts car show (put on by @LasVegasCarMeets) in downtown Las Vegas on May 22, 2024. He had a videographer along for the occasion, so we’ll get video of that soon.

I utterly adore it. The final result is like the car’s straight out of a comic book.

The underlying wrap won’t last forever, although the way we store cars off-season does make it a lot easier. Next month (June) it’ll be too hot to drive this thing around Vegas, so I’ll move it into the dining room, and bring out Sabine, our Speedster replica with metallic pink wrap: