Hello friends!
Finally found some free time to make a lesson for you... The purpose of this lesson is to teach you the steps to create a high quality car clipart of the Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Sahara. This lesson will not teach you how to draw or work in Photoshop. By this time you should already be very good at drawing and at least have a basic knowledge of this software. I will not explain how to add layers, how to change opacity, etc.
I will do short tutorials for that later.
This rendering is taken from work for my portfolio and it's a vision of what an Alfa Romeo could look like to compete with the Mercedes-Benz CLS. You can see below that 3/4 of the rear and front design of the Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Sahara is already done.
Ready to get started? Put your headphones on and let's go!
image via hum2d
First, I sketched out a rough sketch with a ballpoint pen on normal drawing paper. It's a small image with an 8 cm width that allows you to create a quick sketch, test out perspective, proportions, etc. in a short amount of time. Don't worry if it's messy or the proportions aren't perfect, we'll fix that very soon. When you draw a sketch of the new car, try to draw all three angles (side view, front view and rear view) to see if they fit together. The side view can look really great, but if you don't think in 3D, you'll ruin all the other views. Remember that this is a three-dimensional object.
After scanning the sketch, change the scale to make it into a large image. I usually use a resolution greater than 3500 pixels and 300dpi, which gives me the ability to add a lot of detail (depending on the type of rendering) and create high quality printed copies. After scaling, create a new layer above the thumbnail and change the blending mode to Multiply. On this layer you will then redraw the car clipart, this time with the corrections you think you need. The easiest way to find mistakes is to rotate the image horizontally for a fresher look at things. After that, you can get rid of the original sketch (layer) if you want.
When you're done with the previous step, you can change the background color, although you don't have to. Paint the layer with the background in gray or whatever color you want. A lot of people talk about how white backgrounds are very discouraging... I don't use it for one simple reason: I work on a double screen and with so much white I would go blind right now... I'm sure you would!
Before you move on to the next step, you have to be ABSOLUTELY sure that you have a good sketch of Ford Explorer.
Now it's time to decide on the location of the light source, as well as their number. Remember that without light you can't see anything and it's through light that we can discern shapes and volumes. Learning how light behaves is the key to good clipart. Don't be lazy and study it! It looks very bad when you do shadows indiscriminately, so don't do it that way. In this drawing I used 3 light sources. To make life easier for you, I drew a little sketch with the location of the light sources. Once you've decided on the lights we start adding shapes like wheel arches, windows, headlights, air intake grille and the shadow cast by the car.
Then create a new layer and start applying shadows according to the light sources we defined beforehand. I used a soft round brush to apply the shadows and a medium rectangular brush to apply the highlights. Try to avoid high contrast when applying the first strokes, as we will gradually increase their saturation. We want to achieve a range of specific color (gradient). At this stage it is gray. A pure white shade will only be used on those surfaces that directly face the light and vice versa for black. In reality we rarely see a pure black shade, because there is such a thing called light reflection, but we will forget about that in our drawing.
Increase the contrast with increased pressure on the tablet pen. I also added some color to the tires and painted the area under the car in light gray. This was done because the side of the Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Sahara clipart is not flat, but has a certain curvature, which means that light is reflected to the car when it hits that ground and vice versa. This is called "reflected lighting" and it means an object illuminated by other objects and light sources indirectly.