Isn't she purdy? Homemade tiger stripes on my soloist

Great tip!

Yeah it's definitely not for every situation but I'll pull it out when it's needed.

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.