Using photo reference to create a wild bubble-top Jet Car with PhotoShop

In this Motorburg tutorial, the artist will demonstrate how to slice a photograph into layers, how to draw paths to use like masking-tape and how to repaint the photo’s parts and reassemble the layers to make a new car. You’ll see step-by-step, as he turns a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado into a bubble-top Jet Car… like something you might see on a Jetson’s cartoon. So sit back and follow along as he creates a “glide ride” worthy of George’s own son — appropriately, Keith calls it The “Elroydorado”. Let’s begin -

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When first planning this demonstration, two ideal cars came to mind; the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado and the 1960 Chevrolet Impala. The Caddy won out by a fin. I borrowed a high resolution photograph of a ‘59 from the internet and the process began. My ultimate goal is to illustrate it with more realism than a cartoon, but not to make the final rendering photo-realistic. The car in the photo I picked has a lot of problems with reflections in its paint – but that’s not important, it was chosen simply for the stance and shapes that I wanted to work with. In the end, everything will be repainted anyway.

You can think of this process, as if you’re watching me cut a real 8 x 10 glossy photo into pieces with an X-Acto™. I’ll be using the pen tool in Photoshop® (referred to as “p-shop” hereafter). The pen tool behaves just like the drawing tools in vector-based programs. I’ll be using p-shop 5.5. although later versions will certainly work.  However, I prefer the simplicity, compact size and stability of 5.5. Below is the car already cut out of its background. Below it is an image of the path. All of the color is removed with Menu-Image/Adjust/Hue/Saturation, the Saturation slider moved left -100. I will be repainting just about everything and prefer that no existing colors influence the painting. I filled a new Background layer with pink to provide a contrast between it and the car.

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I duplicated the photo layer so there is an original for reference and keep it at the bottom in the Layers palette and turned off. The list of layers will get long. I think of the layers in p-shop as sheets of clear film stacked on top of each other. By putting the car parts on different sheets of clear, I can turn each one on and off and rearrange the stack as needed. I can then make a part translucent so that the parts under it show through like candy-colors do on metalflake. The last time I walked around a ‘59 Cadillac I had to stop and rest! There is a lot of knife work to do to make the car smaller (in the computer). The outer headlight is trimmed off on the far side with a duplicated and modified version of the original path.

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The next step is cutting the near side off with yet another path.