This portion of our site is dedicated to Pat Gaines founder and owner of West Coast Airbrush Company the Nation's largest chain of airbrush T-shirt shops. Over a career that spans 25 years, few airbrush artists have been quite as successful in as many different aspects of our industry as Pat Gaines. Starting out as a high school kid painting T-shirts and car murals for friends and family members then moving on to college at Ringling School Of Art And Design in Sarasota, Florida Pat figures fate intervened at that time and paired him up with his first summer job airbrushing in a T-shirt shop in Panama City Beach, Florida.

One of the very first T-shirt artists along the north Florida Gulf Coast in 1975, Pat honed his skills and developed the abilities that would carry him into the 1980's, a decade that would prove to be the awakening of textile airbrushing. Panama City Beach that would soon have an airbrush T-shirt artist population of nearly 300, Pat's shop "Trader Rick's" became the first big "hot spot" for the T-shirt airbrushing business. The store open 18 hours a day churned out literally thousands and thousands of T-shirts, license plates and other airbrushable items every season.

For 18 consecutive summer seasons, Pat managed a line up of artists at Trader Rick's that reads like a who's who of textile airbrushing. During the winter months between 1975 and 1988, Pat traveled and plied his trade at hundreds of locations in over 20 states, from 1982 to 1986 Pat operated three airbrush locations in Breckenridge and Vail, Colorado.

In 1989, Pat decided to settle down and moved back to his home town of Mattoon, Illinois opening the first West Coast Airbrush store at Honey Creek Mall in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1990. This was the launch of West Coast Airbrush. In the 1990's West Coast has opened successive stores in shopping malls in 6 states making it one of the Nation's largest chains of airbrush T-shirt shops.

The evolution of Pat's career as a working textile artist, store owner and entrepreneur has been offered up for all to share. During the last 15 years, Pat has written over 50 articles for industry trade journals including Airbrush Action and Impression Magazines, The Press and Shirts Illustrated Magazine. Pat has written everyone of these articles totally free of charge in order to try and give back to an artistic community that has given so much to him.

Today, Pat is still hard at work volunteering his artistic talents to local elementary schools and has developed and donated an entire textile airbrushing lab at a local high school, teaching students basic airbrushing skills and leading them through a true vo-technical program that they will some day benefit them when they become working textile airbrush artist themselves.

The new professional partnership of Pat Gaines, Tom Davison, Terry Hill, Pat Reynolds, Don Ashwood and Mark Daehlin will pave the way for West Coast Airbrush Company to stay a leader in the T-shirt airbrushing industry well into the new century and Pat remains committed to continually evolving new and innovative concepts from which the entire airbrushing community world wide can share.

This web page is the first place in which this much free information about textile airbrushing has ever been amassed with the intent to help others. In this way the partners of
West Coast Airbrush Company thanks you for your support

The following article first appeared in the March / April 1995 edition of Airbrush Action Magazine and is reprinted here with their permission. We would like to thank Airbrush Action for their cooperation.

West Coast's Winning Ways