Transcripts
1. Speed & Motion: How to draw an F1 racing car illustration, by Chris Rathbone: Hi there, My name
is Chris Rathbone and I'm a freelance illustrator. I work predominantly in the sports
and automotive industries and I've created a work for
clients such as Formula One, the NBA, Red Bull, Puma, and Top Gear. My background is in graphic
design and art direction. And I made the
jump about four or five years ago now to quit my day job and focus full-time or my career
as an Illustrator. I often get asked how I create my illustration work - what software I use, what techniques I use, and how I go about
creating an illustration. So I've put together this class
where I'm going to be creating an illustration from
scratch of Daniel Ricciardo, who is the McLaren F1 driver. We're going to be starting
literally from a blank canvas and I'm going to show you
how we start to build up a rough skeleton sketch using really simple geometric
shapes and lines, and we can then
take that sketch, flesh it out to create our
linework and our inking layer. Then I'm going to show you
how we go about adding color and lighting and shading to our illustration to really make it come to life. By all means, you can
follow along and create the same drawing I'm going
to create in this class, but these techniques and principles are the same techniques and principles that I use for nearly all of my illustration work. So whatever the subject matter
that you are drawing, you can follow along
with this process and apply these steps to any
drawing you wanted to create. This class will be
perfect for all levels, so whether you're a
traditional artist who's looking to make
the jump into digital, wherever you already
experienced digital artist, or whether you're
new to illustration and you just want to find
a way to get started. I'm excited to put
this class together. I hope you enjoy it. And I'm really looking
forward to seeing the work that you create
off the back of this class. Let's jump into the video. I hope you enjoy.
2. Stage 1: Build a skeleton: Let's get started. We're going to go ahead and set up
a new document here. So I'm gonna start
my document to be 1 thousand pixels square. I'm going to make
sure I document RGB because it's going to be
used for online purposes. We've got our art board here. Now. Obviously we're creating
an illustration from a blank Canvas here. It can be quite daunting to
just go straight in and start drawing without really having an understanding of what your
composition is going to be. What we're gonna
do. First of all, is we're gonna build up
a very rough composition just using really
simple geometric shapes and lines to get an
understanding of where our drawing is going to sit and what the composition
is going to be. I'm just going to put
in a horizon line here, which is gonna be the road which ultimately
our cars is gonna sit. Using the ellipse tool. I'm just going to create a
series of ellipses here, which is basically
going to be our front wheel and our real-world. We're going to create
a side profile of the F1 car race
and its speed here. What I'm gonna do now is I'm
just going to start drawing in some very rough
simple shapes. This is probably not gonna
be very recognizable as any specific Formula
One car at all. Board is gonna do, is
it's going to form almost a kind of skeleton
from our drawing that we would then flush
out and add our data onto. I'm using a series of
simple lines here. Just going to scale
this down a little bit. And this again is one of
the benefits of working in really simple geometric
shapes is if you want to move things around or
change your proportions, where we've got
very simple shapes. It's really easy to do that rather than having
to play around with trying to move lines around
and shade in an inky and etc. I working with really
simple shapes. It doesn't look all that
great at this moment. But obviously as we develop this drawer and it's going
to look much cooler. I'm just going to use
the rectangle tool to create the front
and rear wings here. Again, just using some
really simple linework to put in some of the
detail for this car. Of course, you can use some
reference images for this to make sure that your car looks
as realistic as possible. Obviously, if you're
creating a specific car from a specific rice and
you want to make sure that you're
accurate view details. Feel free to use and
reference images if you want. But we're really creating
our own composition here from scratch. I want to use a line tool down the front here just to create
a top of his nose cone. I think this n Pi Here's
a little bit too long, so I'm just going to shorten
that and I'm gonna move this side pot plate down here. And I think I'm just
going to actually extend the wheelbase a little bit on the car here to make
the car bit longer. Again, because I'm working
in simple geometric shapes. Once I start plotting a
few of these shapes in, I can then start to see if things are working
and if they aren't. And it's a super quick to
make any adjustments to your composition
when you just got minimal lines and simple
geometric shapes. I'm gonna draw some detail
in here for the side pod. I'm going to put in
some rough lines here just to see
where the top of my car around the top of the engine cover just to see
where that's going to sit. I think that's
looking cool. I might just move that slightly down. One of the things because
we're not drawing or tracing over a
specific image. It gives us a lot more
artistic freedom to exaggerate a few of
these proportions to create a much more
exciting illustration. Now with some of my work, clients may want me to work
from a specific image, in which case you really have to draw a trace
from an image. But with this piece, we're
creating it from scratch. We've got free rein to
be as creative as we want to extend a few of
these proportions out. Queer, more excited image. Our drawing is ultimately
a side profile of his car, but we don't want
it to be a flat two-dimensional
drawing a carbon. We still wanted to have
a lot of depth to it. What I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna put in the rear end plate, which is furthest away
from our rear wing here. And that's a couple of little things that
we'll do like that with the rear wing and play with the wheels that are
further away from us. We will draw those in a
later stage because it adds some really nice
perspective to our car. We're not gonna get too bogged
down in details like that. I'm really happy with how the
composition will build has come along mostly as
super referred a moment, you wouldn't want to
send this to a client or anything because it's
very, very rough. Er, this is for realists,
for our purposes, just so that we can
get our proportions correct before we move
on to the next stage, which is gonna be
our sketching layer.
3. Stage 2: Create a loose sketch: So now we've got our build
layout, we're ready to go. I'm happy with how
that's looking. I'm just going to set
up a new layer above it called sketch elements. Set the opacity of our build
layer back to about 50%. Just that is clear for me
to see what I'm doing. Now I'll say this is
personal preference, but for my build layer
would like to work with a light blue color. Just so that when I
start inking and draw a line work above in our black is much clearer to see what we're doing
and you don't get confused with your lines. On our sketch layer here, I'm basically going
to start using the skeleton sketch
of our build layer underneath and start adding in more detail for the sketch. Now it's important to
note this sketch stage is still fairly rough. This again is
personal preference. I mean, if you're creating a relatively simple
illustration, you might feel comfortable
with go straight into inking layer from here. I always like to spend
five to ten minutes or so drawn another layer, which is effectively
an in-between layers. This is gonna be in-between
our final inking layer, but then a staged higher with more detailed
and our build layer. I'm gonna draw in
the wheel here. And we're gonna do is I'm using a skeleton live underneath. But as you can see,
I'm just going to add in a few more lines and detail here to get some
perspective on the wheel. And to make sure
that I'm getting a bit more detail coming
through my drawing just to check that our
build layer underneath. Once we start adding more detail that the composition
is still working, I'm going to add
in some internal lines around the wheels here, which will form our motion lines which will come
to a later stage. And what I'm gonna do is
you can see that it's just building up much more details.
It's still very rough. It's always a good
idea to just keep flicking between
your build layer, flipping it on and off. Just that you can
see how this layer is looking in isolation without the distraction that build lighter blue
lines underneath. I don't want to
work in the lines. I want to do is
I'm going to speed up the video slightly here, just for the purposes of time. It's pretty
self-explanatory what I'm doing and you'll be able
to see all my line work. And then what I'll do
is once I've got to a stage where I'm happy
with my sketch layer. I'll come back to you and we can chat about what we've done. I've pretty much finished
with our sketch layer now, I think it's looking
great as you can see, relative to the build
Lao underneath. There's a lot more
detail I did in here. And if I turn the
Build live off, you can see that a car
is looking much more realistic and it's a much
more detailed drawing that I'd feel more comfortable
sharing with somebody external to get their folks
in input on the composition. This is by no way our
final inking layer. And as you'll see when
we come to that shortly, we're gonna be adding
an awful lot more data on really taken this
to the next level. But for the purposes
of a sketch, I think this is looking great. It compounds my feelings that the build layer underneath
is working well. The composition is right, the proportions of a car
or write the details, okay, So it just gives me
that extra piece of mind. I'm happy to take this onto the next stage now and start
developing our drawing.
4. Stage 3: Create your line work: Now we want to our inking
layer and our linework layer. Now, like I said, this is
really personal preference for certain drawings or
depending on your style, you might feel happy
just going straight from your build layer into
your inking layer. I always liked to build
up that sketch layer in-between, like I said, just to give me
an opportunity to work in some extra
detail on top of the build layer to check
that I'm happier this before I start going into
high detail with my inking, what you may find
is that some of your line work on your
inking layer might not be too dissimilar from the line work on your
sketching layer below. So what we're gonna
do is I'm just going to start off from
the rear wheel here. And further we'll section
particularly this will probably be very similar to
my sketch layer underneath, just because I've
see we've captured a lot of detail in that wheel and the tire on the
sketch layer itself. But what I'm gonna be doing
is on our sketch layer, we're not really too
worried about how lines interact with each
other if they cross, etc, because it's really
just a build layer. But what we're gonna
be doing here, where we're focusing
on our line work. We want our linework
to be really on point. And having a foundations are really strong illustration with strong line work will really pay dividends come the
final illustration. It may look like a lot of
these lines are similar, but I'm actually putting
a bit more care and attention into the actual
strokes themselves, thinking about how these lines
intersect with each other. And I'm playing around
with line weight. So I'm gonna be having
various different levels of line weight in here. What you'll see, I'm
just going to draw in some motion lines
inside the wheel here. And what you'll see by these, I'm going to make these
a lighter weight than our detailed lines for
our actual wheel itself. And I'm just gonna go here
and I'm going to delete some sections out of these. Now. I'm just going to
turn off my sketch larger so I can see better
what I'm doing. Yes, I'm going to
tell you asked him sections in-between here. And again, there's no
exact science to this. I'm just using a bit of
artistic license and obviously working
from experience on what I want to remove. But by deleting sections of these lines out and
having these lines that are lighter weight than the
detail of the wheel itself. What happens is they become
a kind of emotion line inside which gives
us a real indication that this wheel is spinning, which obviously it would be in real lifestyle car is moving. You can see the
difference between these thinner lines and a
thick lines of the world, not for example, in the
center of the world and the actual edge of
the wheel rim itself. What it does, is it
correct, so much more freedom
dimensional elements. So playing around with
your white of your line is really important here for giving some variety
to your drawing, also given a bit of
depth to your drawing. So I'm just gonna actually
going to go back here and tweak some wire line weights because I think it was
looking a bit too thick. So I'm just going to reduce
somebodies line weights down for this real-world. And this again is another reason why
it's important to keep flicking off your sketch layer and you build lines underneath, focusing purely on
the layer that you're working on because
it can be easy to get distracted by having two or three layers
visible anytime. Just keep flicking
between them to make sure you're happy with how things are coming together. To work out the detail
on the front wheel here in the similar fashion
to I did for the real-world. Just going to put in
some more motion lines here and delete
some sections out. Then I'm gonna go ahead and
speed up the video again. But what I'm gonna be doing
is I'm just going to be working around the car
in a similar fashion. So you've got a sketch layer underneath is still quite
loose our line work, so I'm really going to be
going in and fine-tune in our line work where necessary, adding in some more
details and really playing around with the weight of the line for somebody's
elements as well. So elements that
are outer edges and defining edit will be
a thicker white lines, for example, in the
middle of the wheel here, which are just internal details. They're not specific
edges as such. I'm gonna go ahead and
speed up the video. And once you get to a
stage where I'm happy, I'll jump back in and then we can talk through where we're at. My line work now is
really complete. I'm really happy with
how that's looking. It's a much more detailed
drawing and our sketch layer, like I said, some
of the lines are still in the same place. So first glance it might
appear too dissimilar. But as you would have noticed, I've been under a
lot more detail in there and really focusing on the weight of line and the detail within
the drawing itself.
5. Stage 5: Inking: Now what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm just gonna put in a little bit of inking
on this layout. Now, for those of
you who aren't, your inking is just
basically solid areas of, in this case black. We should be a really
dark, heavy shadows. This will obviously
differ from drawing to drawing depending
what you are drawing. In our instance here where
we're drawing the car, the real dark heavy areas
is basically going to be the shadows where the
car is hitting the floor, the shadows onto the floor, onto the track from
the car above. And also just some bits
around the wheels themselves. So as you can see, I'm just drawing
in here, um, some, some floor shadows
underneath the car again, using a little bit
of artistic license, but give me forward to where shadows would be
caused from above. For example, the
wheels and tires protrude out from the
sides of this course and our shadows are
gonna stick out and be much more noticeable. And particularly around
the front wing here, the front being obviously
sticks out of the front of the car and to
decide that a cost. So it's going to have a heavier
shadow underneath here. And what this does is
with the combination of our line work being waited
and really detailed. Having this dark shadowed area really helps to ground the car. And already we can see with
no color or shading added, we can already see
that alcohol is actually looking pretty cool. We've got some really
nice depth, fair? Even though, like I said,
we've got no shading or, or any of that detail. I did this just line work, but we can already see
that somebody's edges are really starting to pop
out against the averages. What we're gonna do now
is we're gonna move on to our shadows and shading.
6. Stage 6: Adding shadows: Now again, one of the benefits of creating our own
composition from scratch rather than tracing or drawing over a particular photo, is that we can pick
our own light source. So what I'm gonna do
obviously with this car, the car is outside
on a race track. So we're gonna have
our own light source, which is primarily going to be the sun in the sky
above the car. What that means is any edges which are
underneath another edge or any details around the bottom of the car
or allow rigid the car. They're gonna be in shadow
from the elements above. So focusing on this
rear wing here, this railing employee
sticks out and protrudes above the section of the car underneath the section of
the rearing underneath. All of this section below
is gonna be in shade. I want to do is
I'm just going to fill that in with black. And then what we do is we set the opacity of that layer
to about 25 per cent. We're also going to
set it to Multiply. Now what multiply does is
it basically means when we get to a stage later on now
drawing, we're adding color. Any color in detail
we have underneath the shading layer will
come through the drawings, will be able to see it
through our shadows, but it will be affected
by the shadows. There's a really cool
way of adding shading to your drawing that will make a
bit more sense later stage. But what I'm gonna do now
is and you should work in some more detail
around this rear wing, the wing employee, which
is furthest from us. Again, we can use a little
bit of artistic license here and put that all in shade. Now what that does is in real
life that rear wing M plate may or may not be fully
shaded like this. But we're using our artistic license to
fill it in with shade. And what that helps do is add some root depth to
our drawing because it, it really makes the edge
of the wing nearer to us pop and stand out versus the rearing employee
which is further away on to work in some detail here around the struts and the artworks that connect
this rearing to the car. Again, I'm really looking at
everything on the inside and the lower edges of
all of this car, I really going to be in shade. So moving down into
the rear wheel here, I'm going to fill in the
inside that is well, if you think that
is where it was almost a kind of
a cone or funnel, it tapers into all this. We'll not in the
middle. I'm going to put some shading here which follow those lines and
tapers in which gives us a kind of a funnel
effect to this, we'll see our tire is
relatively curved as well, so I'm going to add
some shadow just on the inside of this rear-wheel here at the top and then
also at the bottom. What you can see now is, as I draw this in, it makes you feel a bit
more freedom dimensional. Now, moving on to the
back of the car here, I'm just adding some shading
just to give a bit of freedom dimensional field to
the back of the car here. This is really trial and error with this stage, I
mean, obviously, I've been doing this for a while now I've drawn
a lot cause I've gotten a good understanding
of where I want my shading and my shadows to be. I'm just gonna have a
play around with this. And one of the things
about doing it ourselves, rather than tracing
over an image, is that the way that we draw
our shadows will really determine the tone
of this image. For example, if we wanted our illustration to have more of a moody dramatics of late evening sunset
kind of vibe to it. Then we would have much
more extensive shadows on our car because the sun
would be low in the sky. So lot more of this
side of the car would actually be cost in shade where the sun is low in the sky. Week I'm for kind of a midday
kind of look to this image. I wanted the sun quite
high in the sky, so our shadows would
actually be relatively light compared to if we were looking at like a sunset image. You can keep my shadows
relatively light for this, we will be adding two
layers of shading jobs. We'll come to in a minute. I'm just going to
speed up the video here as I draw around
somebody shading, you'll actually be
able to see all the best I've added in. Then I'll come back to you once. I'm happy with how it's looking. I'm just drawing
in some shading on the front wheel here
in the same way that I did for the back
wheel using that sort of funnel cone effects. I'm typing my lines towards me, put a bit of shadow
underneath the will, not because that
obviously protrudes out relative to
the wheel itself. What you can see
is our drawing now is really coming to
life a little bit. So these edges underneath, so if you can see from the suspension stroke just
above this wheel here, and also from the
elements underneath the wing mirror my costs and the shadows down
inside of the car. It helps to create some
depth to our drawing. It really makes the
I understand that certain parts of his
car were closer to us and certain parts of his car are higher up and protrude out, which really creates
some cool shadows on the base of our car. You can see obviously
the shadows are fairly minimal
at this point. Like I said, I really
just been focusing on details around the bottom of the car where I want
my light source is quite prominent in
a top of the sky. I don't want to call
in too much shade.
7. Stage 6: Creating low lights: That's the first
layer of shadows. Again, this is really
personal preference. You can add in more
layers of shadow, like I'm gonna do now. It comes down to
several factors. It depends on the style
of what you're drawing. It was also depends
on how much time you've got available
if you're adding effectively a second layer of shadow which takes up
twice the amount of time. And if you're doing one,
obviously some drawings, I even go in and maybe add three or even four
layers of shade just depends on the look
that you're going for. So for the purposes
of this video, I'm going to add in a
second layer of shadow, really just to help
you understand the benefits to having more
than one layer of shadow. So I want to create
a second layer above this one
called low lights, again focusing on the rear wing. Now what you may find is that what we can do is
we can effectively, like I'm gonna do for this
rearing end plate here. There's gonna be very
little difference, if any at all on the low lights layer versus the shadow layer underneath.
For this rear wing. What that does is it really
helps compound and exaggerate the depth of how much this top edge sticks out
relative to the bottom edge. You can feel that
shadow layer now is effectively twice as strong. So it's really deep, the shadow one here. And it really helps
you realize that it's recessed into
this car quite a bit. There'll be other
areas of the car where our shadows
are much looser, are much wider than
now previous layer. For this rear wing,
particularly as I work around the rearing end
plate and the struts here is not going to be too dissimilar at all from the
layer that we previously got. And that's called, again, it's just hoping to compound
the depth of this shaded. So as we move around the
back of the car now, again, it's not a million
miles away from where we were. But while I'm able
to do now is you put a bit of curvature
into this line here. And what that does
is it just gives a second layer of
shade into this car, which adds a bit of depth. And it means that we
can play around by shadows not being
too definitive. As we work around the rear
wheel and a tie here. What I'm gonna do is
this shadow around the tire in particularly
it's gonna be much larger and it's going
to create because this as the wheel rim
is inside the tire, it recesses inside
so you would get shading all the way around
the lip of this rear tire, which then obviously
extends round to the bottom
prejudice rear tire. As I work around the side, put here, what I'm going
to use is a much looser, more free flowing line
because the side port is really quite a curved
objects on these cars. So by having a second line, which is quite a way
away from the first line and having it much softer and
rounder and free-flowing. It's going to really help us to understand and help
the eye to understand. There is a much more
rounded object. I'm just going to work
around the floor here again, I'm going to speed up the
video and the essence of time. You'll be able to see
all the lines that I am putting in here and
all the shaded areas. I'll just come back
to you at the end of this process and talk to
you about what we've done. Again, I'm just working
a bit of shading around the tire here to make it a
bit more three-dimensional. And in a similar way, ties I did on the real-world. I'm just going to
add a second layer of shading around
this front wheel. I'm going to knock out the
will not accept the eye one that protrude out from
the wheel itself. As we zoom out, you can see now this second layer of shading, like I said, it really does come down to personal preference. How much time you've got
available to you wherever you want to go in and do
this by already find. It adds an extra layer
of depth to your drawing and we'll do the similar
kind of approach when we come to our highlights
later on in this video. But as you can see it, I
was looking really cool. Now, somebody areas at
the back of the car, particularly a really
dark shaded areas. And around the bottom
edge of this side port, we've got a couple
of layers there. Shade in which adds a little
bit of depth rather than just one flat area of shade. So I think that's looking great.
8. Stage 7: Colouring your drawing: What we're gonna do now
is like I said earlier, if you remember, we set all
of our shading to multiply. And one of the benefits, or the main benefit
for that is that once we come to our
coloring stage, now all of our color
when we put on underneath this layer or
underneath these two layers, it's going to come through. So it helps that shading
stay above our color. Now I'm just going to move
out to shadow layers, but low our line work. The reason being
we want our alarm with Beta top of everything. And we're going to
move on to our color. I'm just going to set up
a new layer called color. And I'm gonna set that below our shadow layers is really important to make sure
we put it below there. Like I said, in any color
we add will come through those shadowed areas
or no shadow layers. If you do get any of
the areas of the car, the aren't appearing
through them. What that means is that just simply there are certain parts of your shadows that you
haven't put into multiply, so they're not being
able to be seen through. Now for this stage, you're almost certainly
going to want to use reference images
if you're drawing something specific like this is a specific car from
a specific right. So I want to make
sure that my colors are accurate and it might detail is right and delivery
and the logos, etc. So you'll have some
reference images to hand for this section. Definitely if you're
working for him, something specific and
I'm just going to work in the gray areas for
the tires here. Now you can really
take your time, just approach it however
you want to work first if you want to do the
car itself or the tires, I always start with the
elements that are closest to me and then work backwards
if that makes sense. As I've got a tie here. Now, you're going
to be putting in the kind of wiggle room itself. And a really nice
detail is I'm going to just use a couple of ellipses
here and knock them out. And what this is
going to create is the text and logos which should be on the
sidewall of our tires. Obviously, this tire
is parameterized, has got plenty logos
and branding on it. We also see spinning speed. You're not gonna make
any of those details. But what we can do
is we can put in some lines around here, which will really help to visualize where
that logo would be. And it also adds
an extra layer of emotion to the wheel
and the tire itself. There's a really nice touch, just adding little
details in here. I've got a solid
white edge inside. And then I'm just going
to create a couple of weighted lines,
even sides of that. Just remove some parts of
it out like we did for us. Motion lines on the inside
that it will room itself. Just because obviously it
wouldn't be as solid band of color around this wheel
around the tie, Sorry, because the logo itself isn't solid around
the whole tire, so there will be parts
of it where the logo be stronger and more
visible than others. Again, it's really
just using a bit of artistic license where we
can make it a bit more engaging and really
emphasize and exaggerate the speed and motion
of this rear-wheel. And obviously we'll come on
to do the same thing for the front wheel and
tire in a moment. I think that's looking cool. I'm probably just
going to extend it out just a little bit further. I'm going to copy that
onto the front wheel here. Because ultimately the tires are pretty much identical
in real life. But I'm just going to
rotate it so they're slightly offset from each other. It doesn't look like
you've just cloned it and duplicate it
in front of the car. And I'm actually just
going to go back and enlarge it slightly for the, for the backdoor here. Another nice thing
it's really cool to do is on the wheel itself, there are some logos inside the actual wheel rim.
In a similar way too. I've done the tire, the logos on the time you're going
to do a similar thing was yellow color here. There's a couple of
yellows, stickers and logos within the wound itself. Again, it's got a yellow
stroke weighted line here. I'm just going to delete
a couple of sections out. Again, there's no real
exact science to this. These are just pieces
from my experience of having drawn a lot
of cars, if possible. I mean, even if there
aren't logos and details on these
wheels and he's ties. Just by adding a few circular
motion lines like this. Even if they were
just didn't say a lighter shade of gray. If you don't want them
to be logos as such, you can do them in
light shade of gray. And it really helped just
add some movement and energy to these wheels
and these ties. So it's a really
nice touch to add. I think that's
looking really cool now you can see already
that those wheels are looking like there's a
lot of energy and motion and they're spinning at speed, which is the effect that we're looking for, which is great. I'm just going to
work in the color on the wheel, not here. Again, I'm just going to use a bit of
artistic license here. The wheel knots aren't
ready in real life. I'm going to make it red
because again, it helps it pop. We want to add as
much variation in color as possible without
going too far with it, where it's looking like a
crazy multi-colored car. But just by adding
little bits of color like that really helps
certain elements pop. And obviously with our shadowed areas
underneath and really emphasizing that depth is a
nice way to just add in some, some extra details to make
your car bit more interesting. Now I'm going to
put in some really rough block color here around effectively
the whole car. So I want you going to speed
this up really quickly. You'll see I'm just
basically drawing in the black color for the
whole rest of the car. I've got the base
color for the car day. I'll see you at the
moment is gray. The car is predominantly orange, but I'm gonna keep this gray. But at a time being, and what I'm gonna do is
I'm going to work in again, looking at reference images. There is a blue
section to the top of his car today are to the top
of the engine cover here. I'm just going to
draw that in blue, which go for a light
shade of blue. Actually, what I'm
gonna do is again, looking at the reference images, the detail of where these lines, there's actually some
detail lines which protrude out onto
this back wing, the shark fin on the
back of the car. I'm just going to draw
in two lines here. One of my favorite tools in Adobe Illustrator
is this blend tool. If you've never used
it for, it's really cool because you
can basically draw your two most extreme
parts of your line. And then instead
of having to draw all the other lines in between, you can use a blend tool and it automatically creates
the stages in-between. You'll see I'll probably end
up using this blend tool again at other stages
for the drawing. We just mean instead of
drawing these lines, it's actually created it for me. And you know that the distance between them is gonna
be consistent for each one and you can
adjust the distance between them yourself. It's really, it's really
quite a handy tool. Again, this comes down
to personal preference, but I'm just put
in where these are internal colors and
D cows on this car. I'm just going to put a line around them
because ultimate, I quite like my drawings to look like they're drawn
if that makes sense, you could go for more
graphical approach and just have the
color without having any line around it by
she quite like having just in the same way that all of our car has got
outlines around it. I like having if there's
definitive stickers or a changing color or
anything like that. I like to just put in
a lighter way of line. So you can see I've just
used a one-point line there. What it does, it just helps those graphic details
stand out on the car. I'm just going to
draw around here the primary orange
part of the car. I'm just going to
select a piece here, and I'm just going to draw in the line above it against
what that does is you can see it just helps
the orange section stand out from the carbon, that blue section just by having that real thin stroke
of black around it. Again, personal preference.
But from my experience, I find that really
works quite well. I'm just gonna tweet,
I'm just going to tweak the color of this orange and
not quite happy with it. I wanted to be a
bit more yellow. What I'm gonna do is I'm just going to speed up
the video just for a little bit to skip
through this process, you can see all the
colors that I'm adding and then I'll
come back to you in a moment when we get to
a more complex part. I've added in our
real basic color. You can see I've got the
orange and the blue here. Probably notice I use a
blend tool again and I was talking about
what we're gonna do now is I've been sent some of the sponsors and logos
from the client. So I'm just going
to import these. These are super high res,
which is really handy. And I'm just going
to expand these using the Expand
tool in Illustrator. Once it expanded, it
means I can change the color of them as well,
which is really cool. So if I'm working from
a particular palette, or if I wanted to tweak
some of the colors of these logos, I cannot do so. I'm just going to drop
this logo in here, make it primarily white. And I've got another one
here that Dell Technologies, I'm just going to expand this
because they're high res is really handy to be able to get his crisp
and clear and sharp. Again, for this one, we're just gonna
make this one white. And I'm going to sit
this off for the blue section on the top here. I've got quite a few
logos to add on here. So again, I'm just going
to bring these integrals speed up the video as you
see me bring these in, but using that same process
of just expanding them and implant around with them to put them on the car
where I want them. That's looking cool. I'm just
going to go in here quickly and draw in some of the details
on the crash on me here. So just painted details
in the crash helmet. He's got this kind of
rainbow effect with shades of blue on sections
at a crush on it. So I'm just gonna go in
here and pull those out and draw those bands of color in, create this kind of
gradient of shades of blue. Then we're pretty much done with the color for our drawing. We're going to jump
onto the next stage.
9. Stage 8: Adding highlights: Now we're moving onto our
light in and highlights. So I'm just going to add a
new layer called highlights. Again, we want this
above our colors. So basically any lighting
or shading layers, we want those above our
color because we want them to be applied to the
color underneath the car. We've got our
highlights lay here. I'm really in the, using the same principles we did for the shade embassy with
the opposite approach. Where our light source
is high in the sky. Where are you
focusing before and all the details at the bottom of the car and underneath
I've objects for our shading. We're gonna be doing all
the elements at the top of the car or the protruding out. And we're going to
pull those out on our highlights to help
add some depth to it. Now what we're gonna
do is we're going to set the opacity back. Again. It really depends on
how strong you want to go. I'm going to knock this
back to about 25 per cent and we're gonna set it to
the blending mode of screen. Now screen is really the
opposite of multiply. So we're multiplying knocks out the y and just allows
blood to come through. Screen kind of knocks
out the dark and the black and it allows the
light to come through. You probably noticed
already that I'm not using white itself. I'm actually using
a yellow tint. Again, this is really from just personal experience
and preference. You can use white and
work perfectly well. I like having this yellow
shade because ultimately the sun above is not white. Shadow is more of a yellowy, a yellowy orange hue to it. I find just by putting this thing and
especially when you're using your light source on
an object that's outside, which is going to
be from the sun. It's nice to just have
this yellow tint to it. I want to work in the highlights around the bottom edge
of this real-world. I've actually just noticed
my shadowed areas. There was a bit
of a mistake just around here and we will
not I'm just going to unlock this layer above for the shadows and just go in
and tweak this quickly. And then moving around
to the top of the car. I mean, what you're going
to find is where we had our shadowed areas were primarily working around
the bottom of the car. This is gonna be the
opposite, obviously where our light source is in
the sky above the car. Most of our highlights, in fact, pretty much all of
our highlights are gonna be around the
top of the car. So I'm just gonna work around the top of the
engine bay here and continue this round to the halo area above
the driver's head. And you can see what
I'm doing here. So again, for the
essence of time, I'm going to speed up
this section slightly. And then I'll come
back to at the end and talk through
what we've done. I'm just going to work in the highlights on
the front wheel in a similar way that I
did to the rear-wheel. Have a quick zoom out. I think that's
looking really cool. I just got some
highlights to add around the front wing end plate here and around the
front nose cone itself. And then we are
pretty much done. What you can see
already is that having these highlights around the
top of the car are really starting to add some depth to
our car in the same way to our shadowed areas were underneath work in
his last piece here, just on the nose cone. And we're pretty much
there with our highlights. Now again, this comes down
to personal preference. If you're happy with how
your drawings look in with just this one layer,
then, then great. But as we did two
layers for our shading, I'm gonna do a second layer for our highlights
areas as well.
10. Stage 9: Lighting: I'm going to stop
a new layer here. I'm just going to
call this glows. Now what this is going to be, this is gonna be
our real sort of exaggerated areas of the car
that we really want to make pop off from our highlights below as a kind of less is
more approach with this. For example, I'm just
going to pull in a section here around the engine by again, it really is just sort
of artistic license here and trial and error. But what we're gonna do for
these is instead of using 25, I'm gonna put the
opacity up to about 40%, just so that leaves
are a little bit more punchy than our
highlights below. So again, around
the top of the car, this bit would be really sort
of pulled out by the bar, the light above, because this is ultimately the highest
part of the car. I'm just going to play
around some lines here of segfault. Go around, use the pen tool and adjustment tool just
in case you're not working quite how you want them. But you can already
see just these two areas in isolation. Like I said, it really is
a less is more approach. You don't need to
go too crazy with the level of detail or the
amount of these EPA in. But he's extra little
highlights where the sun is just bouncing
back off of the car. Really just helps add that
extra layer of depth to it, which, which is important
in all live drawings. We want to add drawings
and look as freedom I mentioned and as
exciting as possible. Sorry, I'm just going to
work around a few more of these areas at a car pulling
out some other details. And I'll catch backup
view in a moment. Now we are. I think
that's looking cool. One thing I forgot to do, I'm just going to go back
to my color layer here. I forgot to add in
the driver number on the backend of this
carbon has been a logos. So I'm just done, looked
at my color layer here. I'm just going to drop this in the back of the car here and this is white. And
what do you say? This is actually a really
good example to show how our highlights now shadow layers which are all
above this color layer, how they affect the shade
of this white logo. So it's a really
cool way to just see how your shadows
are coming through. So that brings us to the end of the highlights and the lighting. And we're gonna move on
to our new section now.
11. Stage 10: Create a background: Alcohol is looking really cool. I think it's looking
things within. Great. Actually.
Obviously at the moment we've just got a
floating car on a page. We haven't got any context or background or environment
for this car to be in. I'm gonna go ahead and
create a background. Now again, this
really comes down to preference of what your
actual composition is, what it is you're drawing
what the environment is. We've got a side profile
view this course. It's a really nice
way to show speed in the background
because we can keep our background in that
two-dimensions as well. And just by creating
a series of lines, I'm just going to start
using the rectangle tool to start drawing in just some rectangular
shapes of color. It's ultimately going to be the barrier or the
wall behind this car. I'm gonna put in
just a rectangle of gray color here for the floor. And another nice little
touch our light to add, especially when you're
working with the cars, is putting in some
just scribbly lines, almost black here where
these are gonna be bits of grit and rubber coming off of the tire and
coming off of the road, I see where our cars
going at speed. It's gonna be
pulling up chunks of this row so we can use a
bit of artistic license, which really helps
exaggerate the speed. Do the same for the front here. And I'm going to set it to a
lighter gray and just move them around a bit so it's not a complete copy from
the real-world. And what that does is
that as another sense of speed to our drawing because as well as the
car physically move in, we've got pieces where it's interacting with the row below, which are ultimately bouncing back off the roses are really nice little touch just to
add a few of these bits, I'm just gonna go
back to the rear wheel here and actually just exaggerate this a little bit more and make them a bit larger. You can have a play
around with these. I'm going to move a
few of them around and make a few of them a bit larger just so that they're
more noticeable, especially off the rear wheel, unless off the front wheel, but more of the real-world, I want those to be a
bit more exaggerated. Again, now I'm going to
be looking at our road. Road is ultimately
just a gray object which will be pretty boring
just to have it as flat gray. So I'm going to put in some bands of color and
different shades of gray. So I'm going to use
a line of red here, which is going to effectively, again using artistic license. I'm just going to have this note the edges of the track
itself, if that makes sense. If you imagine this
truck in real life, it would have lines painted
around the edge and attract so that people know where the edge of the truck is. So I'm just going to put a
couple of lines in there. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm not really applying any
exact science to this. But I'm just putting
in some lines and some rectangular shapes, which we can just play around with to create
a bit of motion. I'm going to put it in a
darker blue background for the sky up here. I've actually decided that
I know initially we talked about having this is
a date-time segment, a son high in the sky. I've actually
decided to revert it back to having more
of a dramatic source, garlands almost like a sunset. And because we've
got our shadows and our lighting on our car,
which is more prominent. I mean, if this was an
actual nighttime setting, like we said, then
the shadow is on the car would actually
be pretty dark. The car would be
almost quite muddy, especially where it's
orange, you might get kind of a muddy brown that his car. But I think actually
what's going to work really nicely as by having the brightness of the
cars if it's in the daytime, but then having a
nighttime sky behind it, it's really going to make our car pop off in
the background. And it's gonna create
a much more dramatic and visually impactful image. I'm just going to
be working in here just some details for a sky. I'm keeping his quite rough and geometric because actually want to add quiet Law of Motion. Today's, you're not gonna be
able to make out any detail with maybe the exception of
the wall behind the car. The rest of it's just
gonna be quite abstract. So I'm just going
to go ahead and speed up the video here. I'm going to be
playing around as I go by seeing what's
working and what's not. And I'll catch back up
with you in a moment. There we go. Like
I said, I've kept the background quite abstract. What I'm doing now is
I'm just putting in a series of tapered
lines which basically start thicker on
the right-hand side and then taper off to a
point on the left-hand side. Because our car is moving
from left to right. What that does is it really
helps to exaggerate the speed and the movement with these lines coming
from right to left, which adds an awful lot of speed and energy
to our drawing. I'm just going to
put out a couple of detail points
here on the car. Once you're going to extend
out some lime works. If you imagine, if these cars
are carving through the air almost it's gonna be having some lines coming off of these, these edges which are
sort of towards the top. Particularly, I'm just going to put a couple
of lines in here. Again, it's kind of a
less is more approach, but these real sort of subtle details coming
off at a top parts of the car are really nice way of exaggerated and conveying
that sense of speed. I think I'm pretty happy that she likes it is less
is more unconscious. I don't want to go in and
put too much on here. We're gonna move on to
our next section now.
12. Stage 11: Rim lighting: Now I'm just going to
set up a new layer here above all of our shading layers, but still blow our inking layer. And I'm going to call
this rim lighting. Rim lighting is
basically, I mean, again, this is really
a personal preference. You don't necessarily
have to do this. Illustration is looking great. But what I'm gonna do is
I'm just gonna put out a few sections of the car. I'm going to highlight him really strong,
prominent highlights. If you imagine if there is
a light source above this, above this car, is going to be picking up some of the
edges, not all of them. And again, it's a less
is more approach, but it's gonna be really
catching the edges, some of the edges of this car, particularly around
a top policy where our light source is
high in the sky. This camera on top of the car. And what you'll see is I'm using the same color that I used for our highlights and
our lighting areas and our glows with low. But I'm not actually
going to set the opacity back on these. I'm going to keep these at 100%. So with that in mind, you want to be conscious that
you're not adding them in too many areas and also you don't want
it to be too large. So just working around
the top of the car here, pulling out a few
of these details, which is going to
be almost where the sun is bouncing off. We're just catching the
edge of these elements. And it's a really nice finish. In effect, one thing
that works really well, which is almost a
contradiction of what we're talking
about earlier is shadows around the
bottom of the car and the highlights of all being
around the top of the car. But actually where this is
a three-dimensional object, you would actually get the
light bending around this car. Just by adding again, it's a really minimal approach, just a couple of areas, but just by putting a couple of these rim lights around
the bottom of the car. And actually a
really nice way of values in depth because
the rim lighting office, he's gonna stand out
an awful lot more in our darkest shadowed areas and it will in the
lighter areas. Again, the UI doesn't even really notice it picks this up, but what it does is
it just helps add some depth and some
curvature to our drawings. And assuming that I think I'm
actually happy with that, I don't think I want to
add too many more that I've only added in a
few of those areas, but I really helped the
car to pop from the page.
13. Stage 12: Finishing details : Now I'm going to add
him what's going to be our final layer here. So I'm actually going to set
it's above everything is gonna be our top layer and I'm
going to call this sparks. Now one of the reasons why I wanted to change this to more of a moody nighttime
setting is that you do obviously follow the
formula one racing cars have a floor plate underneath the car and when they're
driving around a track, it really catches on
certain parts of the track. And you get an awful lot
sparks fly from the car, which are really dramatic. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to use
the brush tool here. I'm just going to
brush in a few, just using the white brush and a few tapered lines coming
off the back of the car here. And I'm going to create
some iron sparks. And I want these to be
as dramatic as possible. And this is really
going to add to the energy and the sense
of speed that is called. Now I'm going to group those and we're going to go up here to Stylize and I'm going
to apply an outer glow. Now I want to change my
outer glow to be normal, and I'm gonna select a
yellow color for these with a white stroke themselves and
then an actual yellow glow around the outside it adds
is really dramatic spark. Now what I'm gonna do
is I'm simply going to duplicate this several times just so that that
yellow becomes more dramatic and more exaggerated. And I'm also going to create a elliptical gradient
here in the yellow color, which I'm gonna set
over the sparks. And I'm going to take the
opacity of this backwards. I don't need to be too strong. I'm going to knock
the opacity back to around about 4050% or so. So it really helps those
sparks be pulled out from the wall behind it. I think that's
pretty much it for our for our car drawing. Just going to try
to become my layers here. Your face
is looking great. I mean, if we go back to our
just our linework layer, we can really see how adding our shadows
in here one-by-one. If I just flip
through these layers than adding in our color, then I'll see I didn't
in our highlights, you can really see
how we've literally built this image up from
scratch from a blank Canvas. If you think back to our
earlier rough sketch, it's really cool to see
how this has come to life.
14. Stage 13: Final composition: Now, wonderful final piece. The very last piece
that I'm going to do, this image is already
working really well, just to add a bit more speed to the drawing and a
sense of energy. And what I'm actually
gonna do is I'm just going to rotate all of Maya. I'm going to unlock
all my layers. I'm just going to select
everything and I'm just going to rotate it about
20 to 30 degrees. Again, this is really
personal preference. You don't have to
do this tutorial. The drawings working
great even without this. Again, it's just my
personal preference. I think actually I'm
gonna rotate this frame. I'm just going to extend out,
obviously somebody's lines. What I need to extend out to
the edge of the artboard. But I think it's going to create a much more dynamic composition. Just by having this, this angle to the drawing almost gives a sense of
the cars driving up speed. So it kind of adds to the drama in the excitement
of the car emotion. So I'm just going to
speed up the video while extend that
somebody's lines. I think that's looking great.
I'm super happy about it. Turned out I think
our drawings looking awesome and it's really quite satisfying when you
think back to how we literally started
with a blank white page. And we were to have
a really crude geometric build
layer for our car. And then we sketched it out from there and then we added AR1 kin. And then we've obviously
gone through and done all of our coloring
and shading since then. It's really quite
satisfying to see how you built this from
a blank canvas, rather than sort of tracing over an image or drawing
from an image, which like I said, I do from time to time
depending on the job, it might be their client
requires me to do that or it might be that the job
requires me to do that. I definitely find it so
much more rewarding. Just a bill with
these drawings off from a completely blank canvas. I'll see by all means,
follow along and create this exact
drawing I've created. But the same process
that we've used here is the exact same process that I use for almost all of my work. The only thing
that may change is the number of layers that I had for the shadows and the number of layers I
add for the lighting. But essentially this
build layer with is really geometric shape building
up to the sketch layer. And then our inking layer is the same process that I go
through for all of my work. I really enjoyed putting this
video tutorial together. I hope it's been helpful. Please tag me in your
work on social media, it would be great to
see your drawings, you create offered
the back of this, but I hope you've enjoyed
it and I'll catch you soon.
Chris Rathbone, Freelance illustrator
