I’ve never had a good relationship with cars, at least with cars as a design object.
It’s not that I can’t appreciate the elegance of some designs, of their smooth curves, of the solutions found to make something functional also nice to look at.
I get it, I really do, and some cars are just very cool.
I’m just not crazy about it.

This didn’t make me much popular during my adolescence, where all my friends went on ond on about how that specific carburetor was slightly better than the other one, and how those tires were so fucking thick.
Also, my friends (parents) could afford cars. And they had girlfriends who liked people who could afford cars, who in turn attracted other friends who liked to talk about cars all the time, which is one of the many reasons why I eventually ended up hanging out with people with interests that didn’t involved bloody cars.

Long story short, during my career I’ve always tried to avoid drawing vehicles. I couldn’t always help it, but hell, I’ve done my best.
So, the other day, for reasons I won’t go into, I decided to include some vehicles in my portfolio and, to my astonishment, I enjoyed it!
There are some things here and there that I could improved on, but being it the first one in ages I think it’s not that bad at all.

The thing about drawing vehicles, is that they require a completely specific set of skills.
For the past few years I’ve focused my attention on so called soft surfaces: skin, clothes, muscles, bodies and so on. They catch the light in a different way than polished metal, they require a different set of tools to be painted, and they follow different design rules.
Cars, on the other hand, other than looking pretty, need to look functional. Instead of big texture brushes and a loose, sometimes careless brush strokes, you need selections, vectors and gradients. You can’t really improvise when you are trying to draw a car, and every small inaccuracy look immediately WRONG.

Fortunately, some of the endless rants I had to endure during my adolescence stuck somewhere in my brain, and when I have to draw vehicles I’m not completely clueless.
I’m also getting the hang of big soft brushes to paint gentle changes of light (very easy as long as you set flow to less than 10), and vectors to draw big shapes and highlight.
It’s also surprisingly fast to do once you get the idea.
And, of course, if you paste time-consuming things like wheels and mechanic parts from stock images.
So, I never thought it possible, but I enjoyed drawing this, with possibly more to come in the next future.

by Paolo Puggioni