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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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7. Ooooh, we be so neat and clean - see what I mean, that frisket is wonderful stuff. Here you see the first application of frisket removed and a bit of tidying up with black Verithin and colored pencils afterwards. Notice too, I’ve begun to fill in some of the darker areas (voids and such) with a medium gray marker. I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself, but doing this in gray helps me to feel my way along in the process... thereby adding a small degree of depth and volume to the skeletal line work.
By the way, I’ll bet you’re wondering what that yellow “stuff” by the front tire is. That partners is a faux pas, an inadvertent miscue with an airbrush while working on another project. Not to worry though, we’ll just call it a light from above and make the most of it. Later we’ll “splash” and reflect a bit of this yellow into the side of the car - I think it might even add a bit of drama. Don’t be timid with mistakes... turn them into victories. |
 8. Now we’re almost ready to do a little “body work”. A second application of frisket is laid down and the area representing the painted surfaces of the car’s body are trimmed out and exposed. In case you can’t tell; the windows, bumpers, lights, wheels & tires... even those trim pieces emanating from the front side scoop are covered with frisket film. At this point, it is almost like masking an actual car for paint. We’ll need a few tricks with color to get our illusion correct though - solid purple squirted “right out of the can” won’t quite get us a blue ribbon when it comes to effectively illustrating an automobile design. We’ll want to trick the eye into thinking we’re viewing a shapely and shiny new three-dimensional car concept... which after all, is the real purpose of our demo. |
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| Before we begin the next step, a few procedural generalities are in order. Click Here for a pop-up reference window containing additional rendering information. |
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| 9. Now let’s get on with giving our design the illusion of “shape, shine and sparkle”. To begin, we’re using the darkest shade of our base color marker and applying quick broad strokes just below our horizon line - a second application of the same color gives us the varying degrees of tone. You can think of this horizon area as the “end of the earth” - houses, trees, mountains or whatever... it’s just the high contrast area where the earthly things meet the heaven’s. Remember, our mirror/chrome example from our “procedural pop-up” above. Notice that above this line running through the main body will be the lighter tones caused by the sky’s reflection and increasing in light intensity as our body panels turn and face upwards. Where the top joins the main body, we once again see a bit of the horizon, (also running through the side glass) as this area’s angles of incidence are similar to that of the main horizon line below. For sake of simplicity, I’ve chosen not to portray the back side of our car with any clearly defined reflections, just the downward facing areas receiving the shaded treatment from our darkest purple marker. Keep it simple - as a designer you’re not necessarily out to portray reality, as much as to give a clean and economical impression of it. Sometimes all of reality’s details can be nothing less than distracting... y-y-y-you know what I mean. |
10. Here we see the completed application of our sky and ground tone reflections in our car’s surface. I’ve chosen two color markers slightly lighter than that used at the horizon and I’ve left a high contrast (almost white) area just above each horizon line. To apply these marker colors I’ve used a “spray on” technique incorporating a marker attachment. It’s a little quicker and less messy than using an airbrush and allows you to stay within the tonal range of your marker pallet (chalk; flaked and smeared, could also be substituted in this step). The “spray kit” is called Letraset Air Marker and it’s designed for use with the Pantone Marker Pens we’re using. Several other companies also make similar attachments for their products. If you do use air brush or spray marker you will find it most handy to have some clear acetate at hand. In order to isolate and protect differing areas and planes requiring tonal changes, you can cut this “see-through” material and use as temporary and movable masks during this and all parts of the procedure.
Keep in mind that this is just an initial application of color in these areas - as always, we’ll be detailing our color work with pastels and colored pencil as we proceed along. Make sure to cover any exposed background and give the just completed color work a light misting with workable fixative before removing any frisket. |
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| Car Design Color Up |
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