I really enjoy doing illustrations ever since I did one in my Graphic Design class. This is one that I did recently and I have had many questions about it recently, so I will do a simple walkthrough on how I did it. To the left you can see the original image I chose. The Lotus Elise has always been one of my favorite cars, and I think that the picture is composed pretty well. I think that is enough intro, so let’s get started.

    The first and biggest step is to outline each individual part of the car. If the image is really complex, just break it up into smaller, manageable pieces. In this picture, I have yet to do a shape on the door panel. Always remember that when outlining you can overlap shapes. For almost this entire picture, after I drew a shape I would make a layer beneath it and draw the adjacent shape. This allows you to not define the edges and get smoother blends when you do gradient mesh.

    Now I imagine that once you have the shape drawn, you could either gradient mesh it now or do them all at the end (or you could also not gradient mesh for a different look. I have a couple illustrations without mesh in my graphic design section). I personally choose to gradient mesh them as I go through, to make sure I am getting the look right. You don’t want to end up with a shape that wont mesh correctly and you have to split it up further.

    This image shows once the gradient mesh was done. The best way to do this is to move the shape up above the image once it’s made and then start matching the colors with the image. If you are concerned about the accuracy, just move it back down and compare them by turning on and off the layer.

    Here is once I was done with the gradient mesh on the door. Note that it doesn’t quite look like the image, but it remains with the style that I have done in the rest of the image. Don’t always worry about little reflections and things like that because we will take care of them in Photoshop. Don’t pass off too many things to Photoshop, though, because it can be more difficult to change colors of complex things.

    This is an outline of the entire car once I completed the gradient mesh. Notice that the car shape seems to be mostly 3d in places. This is because by gradient meshing with the visible colors in the pictures it seems to form around the body of the car. This sure gives a sense of satisfaction knowing that you did the meshing well.

    Here is my completed car illustration. I obviously did not illustrate the background because I wanted to only illustrate the car; also, the background has a lot of texture which is extremely hard to illustrate.

    I was satisfied with the illustration as it was, but I wanted to do something more. I moved the illustrator file into Photoshop, gave it a drop shadow, and dropped in a background.

    I was not a big fan of the white, so I gave it a different background. One I had that done, I needed to make the car look a little more realistic.

    For this image, I made a copy of the car layer and did a “Plastic Wrap” filter on it. I then changed the layer mode to “Overlay” and adjusted the opacity till it looked right. While this added some accents around the frame of the car, there were areas where it was too strong or that it didn’t belong in. For this, I made a mask to adjust the different areas that needed adjusting.

    I then made a few more layers using the “Chrome” filter and setting them as either “Soft Light” or “Overlay”. Do this for areas that need special attention. Two that I put more effect on were the headlights and the rims.

    Finally, I decided that it needed something extra. I used some of ShiftyJ’s Euphoria Brushes. I put some underneath and some on top, altering the hue and saturation of each. After that, I was finished. So here it is. It is a lot of work, but it is definitely worth it. Thanks for stopping by.