New Work: Say Hello to the Ferrari 250 GT California Spider

I previewed the Ferrari 250 GT California Spider illustration I was working on a few weeks ago, and I have finally wrapped up the final build and coloring. For the movie buffs out there, you may recognize this particular "Cal Spider" from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Truly a classic. I used a handful of photo references to get the shape as well as to make it as accurate as possible.

You can see through the various stages how the car came together. I had mentioned in the early post that the crazy “Technicolor” appearance in these early stages allows me to seam the shapes together, and prevent any of them from overlapping. This way, if I ever want a wireframe version of the car, I can just go into Illustrator and switch from fill to outline.

With this Ferrari, I had a few more challenges then I did with the Lamborghini Countach I created earlier.

One word, Chrome.

I wasn't sure how to deal with the Chrome elements on the car initially. It became apparent that the only way to pull it off was to build into some of the chrome pieces, for example the bumpers, a reflection. This gives them a kind of glossy, reflective, and hopefully chrome quality. For the tire rims, I used gradations of light and dark grays to mimic a metallic shine. All in all, I like how the effect came out in the end. 

The tire spokes ended up taking quite a bit of time to make. I ended up adding more and more to help fill out the rims. They are simply lines from Illustrator’s Line Tool made of a few different shades of gray. The time consuming part was creating enough of them to make the spoke rims look accurate.

To finish I added some variations of red to give depth and then used the Shear Tool to give a little more pleasing shape to the whole car. This Ferrari and the Countach are part of a new series I am working on for the car collectors out there. I have an interesting concept that will utilize these illustrations in what I hope to be a new and interesting way.

I plan to have one additional car illustration completed before I reveal the entire line. I will be keeping with the classic car theme, but going American and muscle car for my next illustration.

New Work: Long Live The Petrol Head!

Yikes, been awhile since I've posted. Luckily for me it's because I have been crazy busy over the last month. Unfortunately, the Day Job has been monopolizing a lot of my mental resources as of late. In the little time I have had to myself, I've been working on my pet project for movingthemerch.com. I eluded to my latest obsession with everything auto in my last post, and I've been frantically working on some new pieces.

The challenge has been finding an aspect of the automotive collector art market that hasn't already been done. After a good bit of Google research, it became clear that collector automobile illustrations and photos are pretty common. Not to be discouraged, I've been working on my own illustrations, starting with one of my first supercar crushes as a kid, the classic Lamborghini Countach.

Now, while I've been happy with how my illustration have came out, I wanted to utilize them in a way that would be different. It had to be something that I would want to hang on my wall and I think I'm pretty close to nailing it down. I had a real lighting strike moment the other night, so look for more to come. I know, I'm a tease. While working on my favorite Lambo, I also knocked out a piece featuring some American Muscle, the 2011 Ford Mustang GT.

This Mustang is going to be a part of a re-imagined movie poster that I have my heart set on finishing sometime soon. This particular horse is featured prominently in the big car chase scene in this summer's Drive. For those who enjoy quite, slow moving, semi-action car movies, I highly recommend Drive. This is not Fast and Furious. Be warned. Drive has a heavy '80s retro vibe and is really nicely stylized. Plus, it has helped to further my current man crush on Ryan Gosling. What? The guy can act. Seriously though, a solid performance from the entire cast...And that ends the movie review portion of this post.

Moving forward I'm working on more classic cars. Currently, I'm hard at work on a '58 Ferrari 250 California Spyder which you can see "in process" below.

The reason for this Ferrari's technicolor dream car appearance is that by using a variety of contrasting colors, I can easily see the seams between the shapes. You see none of the shapes overlap. That way when I'm done with the illustration, I also have a really cool wireframe view of the car as well. I figure it could come in handy later.

So, that's a little preview of what I have been up too. I have a few T-Shirt concepts that are classic car and racing inspired as well as a lot of automobile car photos to go through from this summer's car shows. I hope to be able to do some manipulated photo pieces as well. As I have more complete pieces to show, I will be updating with more posts.

Until then, drive safe.