Reader Tutorial: Illustrating a Camaro 2010 by Julio Leite

Hello guys!! My name is Julio Leite, I'm a brazilian web designer living in Sao Paulo. In this tutorial I will show you how to illustrate a Camaro 2010. In case you want to check out my work go to my profile at deviantART.

So, let's start the process...

This will be our final result:

Step 1

First we start with the basic sketch of the car. We have two ways of doing that: looking at the lines of the car at a picture and drawing it "by eye" or we search for a picture of the car and draw it over the lines of the picture, which makes things much easier, so that's the technique I've picked.

Step 2

At the green lines that you can see bellow, are marked some changes that I will do at the car. For esthetic purposes, some of this modifications were not done or were changed during the process.

Step 3

After drawing the lines we can work on painting the car. In this case I will create a composition with the car in a sunset environment, so it's important to get some pictures as references to check out how the light and the reflexes react in that kind of environment.

The first step will be painting the car with his original color. After that we can project its shadow on the ground and also give to its bottom part a darker tone.

REMEMBER: always leave the lines layer apart from the painting layers.

Step 4

Now we will work at the light that reflects on the car. For our illustration let's suppose that the sun is at the left side, facing the camera, so let's add some blue tones at the upper faces, as the sky reflection. On the opposite side let's add tones of yellow and orange as the sun reflection.

Step 5

Now let's move to the more detailed reflexes. We start by the side of the car drawing some stripes varying the colors red and orange. Colors from our sky to the horizon.

Step 6

Here we will give a better definition to the edges of the sky colors over car so we can remove the lines layer of the drawing.

Step 7

Now let's go back to the side part of the car. We will add more reflections, this time smaller ones, for example, the city that reflects at the side of the car. That will make the image more realistic.

Step 8

Now it's time to make the bending and the cuts at the parts that assemble the car. We can do that using a fine line in a dark red tone and with another line in a orange tone.

Step 9

Now we add more details as the lights and the grating of the car.

REMEMBER: black parts never stays totally black. That mean that they react easily to the colors of the environment (vary as the material). In our case, as most of the colors of the scene are hot, so the front of the car has a tone of grey orange.

That also happens to the tires that are black. But as they are more reflexives, they tend to reflect the sky and the city.

Step 10

As for the glasses, darker they are, more they will reflect.

And there we go... here is the car.

Now I will give a small explanation about how I did the scenario.

I've putted together some images composing the scenario. After that I colored the asphalt with it's cracks and the sky with a smoke type brush.

Final Result

I hope you liked the tutorial!!

About the author

My name is Julio Leite and I'm a web designer from Sao Paulo, Brazil. I really like illustrations and I'm also addicted to cars. You can find me at deviantART and twitter.

Edited by GisMullr