Illustrator Hop-Up
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6. Colorizing the car
Since Big Al had blue paint, that color seemed only natural to use as my main color for the drawing. The design will be screen printed on white shirts and since I’m limited to a color palette of four (including the white of the shirts), I opted for blue, grey and black as the additional print colors. I found that grey is a nice “support” color for any other color when you’re doing this kind of car-art. I picked a PMS blue and a PMS grey from the Pantone Color Guide to work with: Of course, I can always change my colors at a later stage of the project.
I continue to work on the line art by defining some temporary ‘hard edges’ for my color areas. I draw them in as blue brushstrokes now. To come up with these borders, think about how the light could reflect off the surfaces of the car but stylize and simplify it a bit; we’re not striving for photo-realism in a three-color project after all.
- borders for the color fills
- borders detail
Now let’s bring Big Al to life by adding some color!
To create a color shape in Illustrator, you need a closed path. I use my brushstrokes to build accurate closed paths:
Step 1: Select all strokes that define the edge of the shape you want to fill.
- building a color shape step 1
Step 2: Copy and Paste to an empty space or layer on your working-space.
- building a color shape step 2
Step 3: Remove the brushstrokes from the paths by clicking the “Remove Brush Stroke”-button in your brushes palette; Your strokes have become ‘ordinary’ lines now.
- building a color shape step 3
Step 4: Trim the paths with the eraser and/or scissors tools.
- building a color shape step 4
Step 5: Connect (Join) all adjacent endpoints to ‘weld’ a single closed path.
- building a color shape step 5
Step 6: After the path is closed, select a fill color – in this case a gradient from 0% spot blue to 100% spot blue – and remove the stroke itself by setting the stroke of the path to “None”.
- building a color shape step 6
Step 7: Move the color shape into position and Cut and Paste behind – or in this case in between – your line art.
- building a color shape step 7
Repeat this procedure for all the fills that you need.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to automate this process. An alternative would be to draw closed paths with either Pencil tool or Pen tool but the resulting shapes are less accurate and can sometimes cause unwanted gaps between the fills and the brushstrokes if you do any scaling or other transformations later.
Here’s a look at the car after I added all my color fills: I’d say the car is complete at this point…
- completed car
Here’s a look at just the ‘naked’ color fills with the line art removed:
- color fills only
And here’s a look at the completed car in black and white:
- completed car in black/white
Note that I’ve been adding to my line art here and there while I have been working on the colors: At some point I decided that the car didn’t look good without a rear window (even when there’s no rear window visible in the reference photo) – so I added one. I also hinted at something of a roll cage around the driver and some other small details; anything really to make the drawing look more convincing. Don’t adhere to your reference material too rigidly, be creative!
On a whim, I tried a different color – purple instead of blue…; yeah much catchier, don’t you agree? Let’s work with this for a while, see if it will ’stick’.
- color change
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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Wow Ger, great tutorial!
The brush explanation and application is fantastic and the 3D mapping is awesome to know.
Thank you for taking the time.
Awesome job man!
-lemorris
Very cool tutorial on the brushes. I will agree they are a not so widely used tool in Illustrator. I have played with the 3d tool but never though of using it to wrap/warp objects. I have always used the enevelope distort to accomplish this, thanks for the tip.
Ger wrote a tremendous piece here, and I sincerely hope that you’ll all give him a big “Thank You!”. TONS of great info, and by far, one of the best documented tutorials I’ve seen in a long time.
So much to learn yet….
Grrrr! Very well done my far away friend. I got a chuckle when you mentioned that ancient Dimensions program. I still have my 4.5 inch floppies of that program (1994 maybe?) My problem as a quadriplegic is, I have no pressure sensitivity in my hands and I can’t press the little button on the stylus. I’ve been designing a pen, but it has a wire that runs to a mouse that I can click. I can draw with a ballpoint pen and get some pressure control, but I’d have to be watching my hands. I’m sure there’s a real-time monitor tablet. But I’d need to sacrifice a few pens and mice to get the electronics correct. Maybe this year (twentyten)! Meanwhile, great tute!
Great tutorial, well written and illustrated! Now to see if I can find similar features in the vector program I use, and try out some bits of your technique.
WOW Ger Awesome work man. I can use alot of this in Photoshop (I don’t use Illy) Thanks for bringing this great technique to our attention!
Thanks for the kind words guys! I really appreciate it!
Great tutorial.. Explains a lot of the mysteries of making Illustrator a useful tool.
Could you explain how you do the grille texture and wheels. Specifically how do you make the grille bars parallel to each other..copy and paste? or just a real steady hand? my attempts freehand are always wavy and distorted..
Do you freehand the wheels and tires or copy and paste multiple ellipses. Making the wheels look right always seems a challenge…
Thanks for any additional insight you can give
KJ
A great tutorial for the whole process. Very helpful!
Ok this is perfect timing, as I have some Illy stuff to work on! Thank you for the great & concise tutorial!
Very nice Illustrator tutorial, you have got to have one steady hand to get the kind of linework you achieve! I’m curious about the settings you use for the Brush Tool — the ones you access by double-clicking the Brush Tool icon.
I can’t maintain consistency in the brushstrokes with the Brush Tool.
Thanks George – You know; I never even realized there was such a thing as Paintbrush Tool Preferences… I guess my values are just the default values as I can’t remember to ever have touched them: Fidelity: 4 pixels; Smoothness: 0 percent. All other options are checked and Within: 12 pixels.
Very well done tutorial. I haven’t gone digital yet, but am glad I will have this to refer back to when I make the move.
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