You'd probably need to pop the grain with a dark grey stain (black may be too severe, though you could test it out with some lines of stain on some scrap wood first), rub back carefully to leave just the highlights, then spray a couple of coats of nitro sanding sealer, rub back, then spray with a white tinted nitro lacquer (not solid nitro paint), followed by nitro clear coats. Look at the picture of the Tele body here http://www.northwestguitars.co.uk/wh...aerosol-250ml/ where you can still see the ash grain beneath the white lacquer.

I reckon that finish with highlights underneath would get you close to the photo. But you'll only get one chance at the dark/black stain popping and you'd have to be prepared to paint it a solid colour if it just didn't look right when the white lacquer went on. You'd obviously be able to simply spray on more white lacquer to thicken the white and show less of the grain underneath. I'd suggest a solid white for the back and sides.

It's never a great idea to mix paint types, so I'd stick with nitro throughout, which will make it quite expensive as nitro paints aren't cheap. However, getting an off-the-shelf tinted lacquer in anything other than nitro is near impossible.

You could try a can of white auto paint over some stain stripes on some scrap wood to see if a thin coat of that would give a similar effect. However, you'd need to be very accurate with your spraying to avoid doubled sprayed areas that would give a patchy effect with some areas becoming solid rather than translucent. Tinted lacquer is much safer in that respect.

You only need to spray on enough white lacquer to get the effect you are after, and that may not require very much at all. So I'd wait a day between coats to allow the lacquer to dry and give a good finished impression before deciding whether to spray another thin coat. The more layers you put on, the more the detail underneath will be hidden.

You could try a white dye, but with a dark pop stain below it you're likely to get the white turning a pale grey as some of the dark stain will leach out and mix with the white, whereas the sprayed nitro will stay white.

Don't forget to check for glue spots. I'd get some glue remover and go over the veneer join and around the edges regardless, just to be sure, even if nothing seems to show with a turps or metho rub-down.