ABOUT

Todd Hanson of Hanson Graphix started out pinstriping at the age of 15. He had a desire to stripe after seeing customized cars at street rod shows. After working at various sign shops, he started his own business in 1987. Todd wanted to specialize in custom hand-painted pinstriping and signs. His work features no computer aided design. Todd's reasoning is "your own mind is the best computer anyone can have, nobody else is going to have one just like yours, so use it and refine it to the best of your abilities."
Now after 18 years in business, Todd's work has been featured in SignCraft Magazine, Sport Truck, Rodder's Digest, the Dupont Top Gun Award Calender, Popular Hot Rodding, Petersen's 4-Wheel, Off-Road, Auto Art, Signs of the Times, and Pulling Power.
Never to be content, Todd feels his best work is yet to come, " I feel as a designer, I'm really hitting my stride now. I have many new and exciting ideas I want to take some chances with." Todd's work is all one-of-a-kind. Nothing is ever duplicated. The customer comes first. "I want to do my best for everyone, I don't care what the budget is, whether it's $100 or $1000, it's very important to me to provide quality work everytime."
A chance meeting with Brian Henneman of the St. Louis band the Bottle Rockets in 1998, led Todd to his newest line of work, custom painted guitars. "Brian saw my work truck and decided on the spot to hand me over his trusted Telecaster for some trick paint. I'd always been a huge music fan and here I was getting to stripe a guitar for one of my favorite bands. I didn't have a clue how to design the stripes, but I remembered as a kid I always loved those gaudy suits that Porter Wagoner wore on TV. I loved the Nudie suit vibe. All of it was killer stuff. I figured hey, why not capture the feel of those suits on guitars. I think it works pretty good. A couple of fun projects have been to stripe guitars to a certain theme. I painted a couple of guitars for Brian, one was to represent "The Rising" by Bruce Springsteen, and the other was to represent Mississippi. Another project was Roscoe's track bike, which he wanted the same colors on it like I used on one of his Teles.
Todd's been fortunate enough to stripe guitars for Brian Henneman, NYC's Eric "Roscoe" Ambel of Steve Earle & the Dukes, Yayhoo's, the Roscoe Trio, also Brent Best of the Drams, formerly Slobberbone, Dan Baird, legendary frontman of the Georgia Satellites now of the Yayhoo's, and Wyoming based Stonetree Guitars. Currently Todd is working on an order for 4 guitars from country artist Chris Cagle. One of Todd's guitars is pictured on the Eric "Roscoe" Ambel CD, "Knucklehead". Also see Eric playing one of Todd's guitars in the Steve Earle music video for the Disney movie, "The Rookie" called"Some Dreams", and in the Steve Earle DVD documentary, "Just an American Boy".