Greetings ! Well, here's the "Meet the Painter" page. Here's some pictures of past work to help you see how I happened to come up with my wild shape guitars and show you my background in custom painting.

Let's see...I guess I'll start here....I made my first guitar at 13 which was so atrocious I smashed it up with a sledge hammer before my friends could see it. My second attempt shortly after that was much better but it wasn't untill I was 22 that I built another instrument which came out really nice. I started painting friends cars at 17 which eventually led to custom painting motorcycles and choppers at 19. I had numerous choppers that I painted come out in Chopper magazines in the early '70's. I'll post some of those magazine articles with pics of the bikes as I work more on this page. The in between years were spent in custom shops customizing and painting Porsches, Ferrari's and Corvettes as well as other custom cars of the time. I think it's obvious what influences my guitar shapes and painting designs.

In 1993 I started designing and building my custom metalflake guitars. Unfortunately at the time the internet was in it's infancy and I was at the mercy of greedy music stores and expensive magazines adds for promotion. Fortunately there were some magazine editiors that caught wind of my creations and did large color articles in their magazines. The bad news is by the time the magazine articles came out I had dropped out of guitar building and was comitted to manufacturing equipment for automotive painters. I sold that business and now with the help of the internet I am back at custom painting......Guitars !

So what does a guitar builder do for entertainment ? Plays his Banjo of course ! I played at the grand opening of Jamestown, Az. It's a small western town built for events. This is in 2006.

Here I am circa 1993 when I first started building my custom guitars. Enjoy your tour of these pages. Tony De Lacugo

I found some old pics of me painting a VW trike body. The only ones I have of me painting in those early years.

Circa 1971. I just painted a Trike faring for Chopper Specialties in Stanton Ca. One of the chopper magazines did an article on this trike. To see some pics of the faring being painted click on the pic.

In 1972 a couple of my metalflake paint jobs ended up in 2 issues of Custom Chopper Magazine. They were kind enough to mention my name in the article. Too bad they misspelled it ! Click on the pics !

One of the largest obstacles a small guitar builder has is Exposure. That is, getting your work seen by the public. The costs of advertizing is horrendous, so when a magazine does an article at no cost to the builder that will attest to how impressed they were with my outrageous designs. At Guitar World they told me as soon as they pulled my guitar out of the box they showed it to everyone in the building !!!

Guitar World Magazine December, 2000 issue.		Guitarist Magazine March, 1996		Guitar Graphic Vol. 8 1998 Issue

More to come....