Ever since the advent of the car owners have been modifying and customising them to their own specification. This really took off in the USA after World War 2; young men, bored with their old family saloons, began stripping the fenders off and implanting larger engines to achieve greater speed on the drag strip. These machines became known as Hot Rods, and the craze for customising cars has continued ever since.
One of my favourite American cars of all time is the Dodge Charger. I grew up watching television programmes like The Dukes of Hazzard where the guys always seemed to escape from trouble in the orange Charger ‘General Lee.’ The original Charger was like a Hot Rod produced by the manufacturer. There was not much you could modify on the monstrous ‘Hemi’ V8 and I’ve been captivated by this classic American muscle car ever since.
With this digital painting, produced in Photoshop, I was attempting to capture the car’s power and aggressive beauty just by using colour and brush strokes. There are small amounts of detail in the window and wheels, but the rest of the car is essentially made up of broad grey strokes with the line work added afterward. I felt that the dark greys on the grille gave a good contrast so decided leave it completely free of colour and just show the line work. (The addition of colour might have made the drawing look too fussy.) As with all of your artwork, experimenting with techniques is always useful and it can be fun to achieve good results that you were not expecting.
Much of my work is based within the car modification community, so I spend a lot of time at modified car shows in the UK studying these vehicles, chatting to their owners, and generally enjoying being around so much diverse design. I’m often commissioned to produce artwork of these highly modified motors, and this Mitsubishi FTO is one such example. The car is a regular at the shows and features a lot in car magazines. At the time of drawing, this car was a green/gold/pearl colour, which made drawing it using traditional methods quite a challenge. I soon realized that I couldn’t render the whole car with marker pens because the shine would not be so evident. My solution was to use a soft green pencil crayon on the lighter areas, and then blend this with a Letraset Tria Warm Grey 01 marker pen.
I often do quick sketch designs and artist impressions of how a car may look once it comes back from the body shop, and this green Mitsubishi is an example of one of these projects. The car’s owner, Amy, decided she wanted a change of colour for the new season, and asked me to come up with a few ideas to help with her decision. One of my first ideas was to paint the car white, in keeping with the popular trend of clean design, but retaining some of the green so that it would still be recognizable as the same car: an evolution in colour, you could call it. Produced in Photoshop, this low angle drawing highlighted where the new green paintwork would go.
The other choice of colour in this project was black, in an effort to make the car appear more evil and stealthy, but again I wanted to retain a certain amount of green. This quick Photoshop ‘Chop’ – essentially a modification of an original photograph, which can be a very quick way of working out a colour change or slight alteration – was produced to show how it would look in black. This technique is used a lot in the modification business and can be approached in a number of ways. In fact, I could probably write a whole book solely on Chopping!
One interesting feature in this picture is the Mitsubishi badge duplicated in the paintwork at the rear of the car. I used a photograph of the logo and then, making a pattern of this in Photoshop, wrapped the rear of the car in it. I think it is extremely effective in giving the car a racing feel.
I employed this Chop technique to come up with ideas for my own car. I always wanted to own a Fiat Coupé, the first car I studied at university. Designed by the famous Italian design house Pininfarina, it is, in my opinion, a modern design classic, and always makes me feel special every time I sit in it. I decided, along with one of the car body shops I work for, to produce an Abarth-looking version of my Coupé, and this was one of the early designs that helped the process, giving an indication of what its appearance might be.
Over the last few years there has been a large shift in popularity from US Hot Rods to Japanese modified cars. These often began life as modified Japanese saloons, but the manufacturers soon realized there was a market that could be tapped into, so they began to produce high-powered versions of their standard, often family-orientated cars. Cars such as the Nissan Skyline, Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution and Subaru Impreza were built, tuned and then tuned further still by the purchaser. Some of these were tuned to over 1000bhp and have had more than 10 times their original value spent on them by their owners, who want the fastest, most extravagant, and most powerful motor on the show scene.
The modification scene doesn’t just apply to American classics or Japanese exotica; in fact, fairly normal hatchbacks and saloons are often turned into extremely expensive ‘modded’ motors, too. The great thing about the modification world is not having to spend a small fortune on a car in the first place, with the freedom to add and change parts as you see fit or when the wallet will allow.
This marker drawing is of a Ford Fiesta, customized nearly beyond recognition. The actual car has ‘glow in the dark’ white paint, so, in an attempt to emulate this in a marker drawing, I used a range of blue and warm grey marker pens.