It was my cousins high-school graduation the other weekend and I decided to make him a watercolor sketch of Ayerton Senna’s Formula 1 McLaren. Here are some process photos that show the steps:
Step 1:
Proportion, proportion, proportion. You HAVE to nail the proportions of a car sketch. Get those wrong, and there’s little you can do to get it right. An industry standard is to use the wheels as your metric of measurement. Use that as a way to identify the size of the car, space between the wheels, and all the other important lines of the vehicle. Professional car designers can do this with their eyes closed. I, however, am not a professional car designer.
Step 2:
Now that you can see the proportion of the car, you need to recreate it on your paper. This much harder than it seems. If you look closely you can see multiple sketch lines. I even had to erase Senna and reposition him as I got his placement wrong the first time. It’s helpful to have a circle template and a ruler here. Professional car designers can draw perfect circles with their eyes closed. But as you guessed it… I’m not a professional car designer. So I needed my circle templates.
Step 3:
Watercolor in your sketch. This part ends up being the most fun IF you got your underlay and sketch right. Get it wrong, and you’ll find that things aren’t quite looking right, and it’s hard to fix with color. This watercolor was mostly dry on dry watercolor. I did some wet on wet for the background to get some randomness for the blue in the background. I used some Nupastel chalk on top to add the highlights and provide some texture.
Here’s a close-up of the front half of the sketch. You can see I use the circle template to clean-up some of the curves. I also skipped drawing the logos on the car other than the McLaren logo. I didn’t want to bite off more than I could chew with this sketch.
And here’s a fun little photo, because who doesn’t love a good dynamic-angled-close-up of their painting?