“It’s pretty cool,” said the Jasperite of the three-page spread highlighting his work. “I’ve had TV interviews before, but in terms of the airbrush industry, this would be big.”
Bartziokas paints, as the magazine describes, “outrageous designs, bursting with swagger and machismo, for hockey goalies and skeleton sliders.”
The 35-year-old—a hockey goalie himself—bought his first airbrush when he was 18 years old, but it wasn’t until a year later when he picked up a copy of Airbrush Action Magazine that he decided to change his focus from 3D animation to airbrushing.
“I had been airbrushing before, but it was very juvenile,” he said thinking back to his first paint jobs—one on his best friend’s bike helmet and another on his brother’s goalie mask. “I didn’t know what I was doing in terms of the paint—how to reduce it, to get it to run. It was a nightmare. They were terrible.
“And, believe it or not, I for the longest time didn’t have my mask painted. It was just flat black, because if I was going to paint my mask I wanted it to be really good and I knew then that my skill wasn’t that good. So I wasn’t going to butcher my own,” he said with a laugh.
Since those early days, Bartziokas has completed a fine arts degree and made airbrushing his full-time job. “I also paint for myself and send it to some galleries, but this is my 9-5,” he said, noting that he does all of his painting in a studio in the industrial park.
Each mask takes between 25 and 60 hours to complete, depending on the intricacy of the design. So Bartziokas gives himself three to five days for each one.
“Six masks a month is where I cap it off,” he said, adding that any more than that and he wouldn’t have time to see his wife. “She doesn’t really see me a lot in the summer time.”
Most of Bartziokas’ clients come from the Western Hockey League. Last season alone, 16 of his helmets were on WHL ice. “I also have three in the American Hockey League and a few in the NCAA, and I’ve had a couple of masks that have been in an NHL line up, but no starter or anything like that.
“If there was a starter, yeah, that would be cool,” he said, noting that just having a mask reach NHL ice was an amazing experience.
“I reached that goal,” he said, noting that his priorities are a little different these days. “I think my goal is to keep paying the bills and to keep making cool masks. If I can maintain that, I’ll be pretty happy.”
To see Bartziokas’ feature in Airbrush Action Magazine, visit the newsstands in May or purchase a digital copy at .
