Tuesday, March 15, 2011

THE RAT RACE: Drawing and Painting Cars from Imagination

I was never much of a car and truck lover as a child so I tend to naturally shy away from drawing mechanical things. More recently I'm trying to be better at this, because it's a pretty big deficit if you don't have the ability as an illustrator. Luckily, many of the principles are the same as with painting a still life, portrait, or landscape.  However, it does require a more slavish adherence to the rules of perspective.


Below are some steps I took in my process.  Notice that I started with a horizon-line, rough 2pt perspective lines, and a gray background.  Also, I worked out my value structure before I started adding color.  Once these foundations are in place, the details are easy to place relative to the larger perspective and value structures.


 Ultimately this was a successful piece for me.  The biggest was to render the reflective surface of the car.  In the end I arrived at a matte finished surface with some reflective elements added in to suggest the environment reflected onto the surface of the car.  Reflections, are so variable, but I can find some tricks to inventing them.  I'll post some new renderings as I do.

Below you can see the warmer color, higher value contrast, and greater level of detail used on the foreground edge of the car as opposed to the cooler, duller, soft-edged, low contrast relationships used rendered the back end. Since this transition occurs slowly over the surface and stays in the red hue family (red-orange to red-violet) our eye/brain perceives it as the same local color under varied lighting conditions.



------------------------------
View more of my artwork at: www.spencerhallam.com

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Some of the people do not have any clue about this auto repair manuals free for cars. For their kind information it is a perfect solution for the car owners since it contains all sorts of car tools and mechanism information.