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Home > Articles > Ragazine Rack > Car Design Color Up: A “primer” for rendering a car in color
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| A Motorburg How-To Feature |
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| Car Design Color Up |
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3. Here we see the design transferred to LetraMax 2200 / Cold Press Board. It’s a 14 ply, single thickness board and accepts a wide range of wet & dry media including regular and colored pencils, inks, markers and pastels... all the right qualities for our rendering project. Since I’m sort of heavy handed, and I’m using quite a bit of frisket on this job, I chose board because it’s more substantial and holds up to repeated frisket cuts with an X-Acto knife. There are other methods of masking your work such as drafting or low tack tape and you’ll find many alternative surfaces such as Bristol Pads and papers made specifically for markers. Just make sure to use a light touch if you’re using frisket on the lighter surfaces and be careful not to cut through your finish rendering. Been there, done that! Now you know why I’ve chosen a heavier 14 ply.
I’ve gone over the rather light lines from the tracing with a very sharp pencil with hard lead . Some people like to firm up their line work at this time with a black Verithin 747 pencil, but I prefer to “chisel in” any outlines I want to remain as I go along. The Verithin product line has a nice assortment of colors, they don’t break easily and I find they smear less than regular pencils. Don’t forget to have an electric pencil sharpener handy to keep your lines crisp and clean. |
 4. Let’s begin the preparation to put some color in our picture. Applying frisket is the first step. Frisket is a self adhering, see-through film that allows us to protect certain areas from unwanted color and overspray - just like masking tape and paper protects the chrome and glass while painting an actual car. I use Graphix Matte Frisket Film and you can see it applied here as it appears somewhat gray against the white board. In addition to working on the foreground, we’ll be doing the windows with this frisket application, so you’ll notice the mask has been removed from those areas as well. I use an X-Acto knife and a No. 16 blade which seems to give me the best control while cutting the graceful curves associated with automobile design. |
5. Next we’ll try to indicate that our car is “grounded” on terra firma and not floating in space. Shadows beneath the car work well for this purpose but I’m using another device that not only eliminates the need for plotting those complicated shadows but also gives a dynamic appearance of movement. Other than our car, we’re not looking for realism here - just a quick suggestion of the subjects surroundings and a bit of supporting excitement.
Here then is our first example of the importance of frisket. It allows your color work to be spontaneous as you work through and over the masked off areas where you don’t want color at this time. Be patient, you’ll see how well this works when we strip away our mask later in the demo. For this effect I used marker, oil stick and pastel chalk. The markers I used here (and throughout) are Letraset Pantone Markers followed with a Sennelier Oil Stick and a bit of Rembrandt Soft Pastel. The pastel was scraped into a fine powder and applied (smudged) with a finger and the oil was lightly stroked direct from the stick. I then glazed over the pastel and oil to blend with the marker using a small amount of Bestine Solvent on a cotton ball. To protect this area temporarily from smudging, (while we work on the windows) a piece of paper covering the just completed color work is taped to the frisket directly above. |
| 6. Time to tackle some glass. Rendering windows can be difficult - glass can be highly reflective, to the point where you can’t see in - while areas in shadow let you look right through to the interior. It’s just like when you hold your hand up to block the sun’s glare in order to look through a window from the outside. For this rendering I’ve chosen to repeat the horizon line in the side glass, though it wouldn’t occur exactly like this in real life (you’ll note another horizon reference line runs through the body sides from the upper taillight forward). So; below the horizon (the earth) the window receives less light and you see right through - Above the horizon (the sky) the window receives more light and you see mostly the reflected light. The backlight was rendered to indicate that it was slightly creased in the middle. I’m not really trying to “sell” the interior, so a dark contrasting tone for windows was more or less my objective. This was all rendered with gray markers and a bit of blue pastel rubbed in for sky reflections (very little detail and a lot of artistic license).
Finally, before the frisket was removed, a loose paper mask was cut... this one from tracing paper which you can see attached with tape in the example above. Now, the only thing left exposed are the areas we’ve just completed coloring-up. A light misting with Krylon Workable Fixative protects our pastel, oil stick and line work as we subsequently move along.
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| Car Design Color Up |
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