Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Monsters In The Garage

I always keep a list of cars to draw when I have time since my mind is usually thinking about this kind of stuff.  It's weird, although drawing is sort of fun, the main reason why I draw cars is because I have an image in my head that I would like to see in real life.  My habit is that if something I want doesn't exist or isn't obtainable by me, I make it myself.  Therefore, when it comes to images of cars, I attempt to make most of my drawings very realistic so that I can capture the image from my mind and put it on paper.  I also don't usually do art to express any feelings.


I just recently moved into my apartment at school, as I said on a previous post.  Last night, it was too late to run my remaining errands but I was bored to death.  I figured since I hadn't had a chance to draw cars for the entire summer, I could do it now.  Now, one of my dream cars is a '69 Mustang Fastback with a 428 c.i. FE V8.  I've drawn this car multiple times and the photo above, taken at the Mustang Memories show in 2013, served as my reference for this drawing.  That one struck me as being set up almost exactly the way I would build my Mustang in the future.


This is the first drawing I've done in who knows how long that I have finished in one night.  Also, it's my first all-sharpie piece.  I usually use colored pencils.  Almost all of my work, including this, is done on standard 8.5 x 11" computer paper since it's smooth, easy to store, and always readily available.


On a separate note, I generally try to conserve my sharpies because they're so expensive and my family rarely has enough for some reason.  All three of the old, black markers I had with me were partially dried or used up so I had to try really hard to get the ink to come out dark enough.  It probably took me twice as long as it should have to complete this drawing.  The next day (today), I ran out to get a new pair of sharpies during my errands and touched up some spots before scanning.


I have just recently started making intentionally non-realistic drawings.  My goal for this drawing was to put on paper the words "As a child, I never thought of monsters under the bed; I only dreamed about monsters in the garage."  That thought is not original to me but it certainly does apply to me.  Rather than drawing the car straight-up, I aimed to just create the shadow with a few body outlines.  I know the locations of the reflections in the final result aren't completely realistic, but they serve the purpose.


At home, I usually scan my drawings while they're being completed so I end up with pure pencil-sketch versions should I want to color a new one (New idea: compile them into a coloring book! Just kidding).  I number them accordingly such as 0.0, 0.1 for un-colored ones and maybe 1.0 and 1.1 for scans of the final ones, maybe corrected and re-scanned.  Different colored versions go like 2.0, 3.0, etc.  I also just like to document the process of something coming together as you can see with my bike and my building model in previous posts.  This time, I only have photos since the scanner is located in a building all the way down the street.  Not worth running to and from just for this.


This is the "original version." The scan obviously came out different because scanners are never accurate, but I edited the image to look like what I had on the actual paper.  You may notice that the angle of the garage door was messed up in some of the images of the unfinished drawing.  That was easy to correct.


This one has some warmth added to it.  The editing on all of these versions was done on the Windows Photo Viewer software or whatever it is that came on the computer.  I do have Photoshop but this was all I needed.


This one here had its shadows darkened so it's a little more realistic in terms of lighting since the back is hardly visible.

Traditionally, I make multiple versions of my car drawings.  It's usually hard for me to decide which color I like my end result to be so what I do is I scan and re-print the pencil-only drawing and then proceed to color all of them different colors. It gets pretty tiring.  When I was adjusting the original scan to be like what was on paper, I found out what the various color and contrast effects did to the work so being myself, I copied the file a bunch of times and made different versions based on the computer's effects.


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