Automotive Art

'84 Corvette' 11X14 Acrylic on board

I seem to have great difficulty in keeping the old blog up.  The last post was  in late January and now it is mid-April already!  Too many distractions I am afraid.  Many days I plan on writing a post but once the day gets started everything changes and I find myself emmersed in something entirely different.  There just never seems to be enough hours in the day!

I used to do a lot of car art for various auto manufactures.  Ford, GM, Nissan, Toyota, Saab and Jeep, to name a few.  This kind of work can be very time consuming and usually requires a great deal of precision and attention to detail since the finished art is closely inspected by engineers.  The trick is to be true to the design but also instill artistic flair at the same time.  This painting was done with a combination of pen and ink and painted and airbrushed acrylic.  The background was painted on a surface roughened with gesso and a stiff brush before the lettering and symbols were painted by hand.  The car and reflection were partly brush painted and then airbrushed with acrylic to create a glowing shine.

This was before computer art and photoshop, so the art is all one piece, painted simultaneously on one piece of illustration board.  Everything was done by hand in those days!

'32 Packard'  11X14 acrylic on canvas 

This one is a very different approach.  I worked on canvas this time and completed almost the entire picture using a brush and acrylic paints.  The background was applied using a very thin and drippy mixture of mat medium, acrylic paint and water.  The ghost image was painted in with monochromatic detail before additional applications of darker and slightly heavier paint were added to the upper section of the canvas.  The feature car was painted in detail and strong colour before a few whispy highlights were applied using an airbrush.

I was quite pleased with the effective colour and contrast of texture and detail in this painting.  To me, it conveyed a feeling of age of the vintage car but a sense of perfection in the restoration being portrayed at the same time.

Both of these auto paintings were originally commissioned as car magazine covers.  These were wonderful assignments and I enjoyed doing a series of similar paintings for more than a year before the publication ultimately folded.