How to Draw Cars

How to Draw Cars

So you want to draw cool cars!

That's great! We're here to get you started. First of all I want to assure you that your can do this:, With some basic instruction and Some practice on your part, you can draw the cars of your dreams. your can learn how to draw muscle cars, Exotic sports Cars, the draw truck, draw motorcycles, you can even draw a motor home if that's what Revs your engine!.

To start with your will need some good reference images. Basically, that is pictures of cars! Why do you need reference images you ask? Will that's because you may think you Know what a car looks like, but in fact your may not have really "looked" at the car your want to draw carefully and studied its lines, it curves, its proportions and details.

- Placement

Lets talk about how you place yours drawing of a car on your drawing Paper! This placement is what artists call composition. Assuming your paper is a rectangle, before your make a mark on your page Consider when to Place your car. M Your one just practicing', It way not matter a whole lot, but you might as well keep composition in wind from the start. Take a look at these thumbnail drawing (thumbnails are just little practice drawings in art speak!) consider how the placement of the car in the rectangular space affects your feeling about the car and the drawing, I made sure to provide you a variety of dramatic angles to in the reference images. Can you see how the angle of the car and the way it fits in the frame can effect the excitement a energy in the drawing.

- Proportion:

First off all in its most basic sense we need to consider the proportion or size of the car to the page. Secondly we need to study the proportions of the parts of the car to each other. The proportion within the Can.!Study the size of the tire compared to the windshield, the width of the front of the car Compared gate to the back and so on. Renumber that what will and up as shapes and clues on your paper is a drawing of a car, It's not really a Car. all a drawing to is lines marking shapes in the propos proportion to represent a car. J know this may Sound wacky, but the sooner you can look at thugs and see the shapes and proportions rather than flee object (in this care a Car) the faster your will be on you way to drawing; mean and successfully. One way to help you see the proportions is to turn the reference image upside down or sideways and draw if show that orientation. It may seem strange but it works! Trust me. the first time I learned this was in 8th grade and I frankly thought it was dumb and that it would be really hard and that the drawing would be a total wreck. Much to my surprise, it Worked really well and opened wry eyes to seems the shape W things J Wanted to draw, If you want to Some of own reference image upside down I recommend printing them out first. Unless you have a fancy swiveling computes monitor.

- Perspective

When you look at a dramatic angle of a car to draw. you can really see the perspective. Linear perspective in a drawing makes the car look 3D, like its about to race off of or into the paper, As you work on your car drawing, look for the Linear perspective, Perspective on the tines and wheels is what makes then look liter ovals rather than Round. of course if you are drawing the wheel from the side it will look round,

Once again you can do this! A drawing is just lines and shapes on a ID surface. Work on Drawing what you see, nor what you think it should look like, Seeing is the Key. this takes practice So Se ready to make mistakes. When a writes , they get to make a draft! Your are allowed seven expected to have a first draft, a second draft, as unary drafts as you like before you call your drawing final. I usually just Consider my first attempt at drawing a car a study. Its just to learn the shapes. By Her time I have drawing car three times, J am ready to make a final version of that angle, The more you draw, the more you will be able to draw from memory. But you need to study ¥38 and draw to really put it in your memory well!

Digital drawings and 3D renderings

This is about the new technologies in car design. A brief survey of digital paintings and sketches, 3D models and photorealistic renderings, the new automotive design communication forms.

The digital technologies have a great impact not only on the vehicle engineering development, but also on the creative process. Digital renderings and sketches, 3D models, photorealistic images and virtual environments are the new communication forms of the modern Design Centers.

Car manufacturers invested a lot in digital technologies that help them reduce the development time, both for production cars and concept cars. This is one the main reason why the number of prototypes has grown so rapidly in the latest years.

Digital Drawings

Even in our modern era, the first expression of an idea for a new car, or more in general for a new product, is a hand made sketch, drawn with pencils or pens.

It is difficult to think that in the future a new digital technique will replace the traditional media under this aspect, anyway the digital painting techniques are more and more used from the first phases of the design process.

They can be used to simulate the conventional media or to create images with a “digital” look: the latter represents a new form of expression for the designers’ creativity.

The basic tools of digital drawing are a PC, a painting software and an input device: the most common is a graphic tablet.

The most used software are Adobe Photoshop, the standard application for photo editing, which is also suitable for digital painting, and Corel Painter, a more specific software that simulates the traditional media.

A more recent entry is Sketch Book Pro from Alias, a cheap and easy-to-use tool to sketch and annotate ideas. The professional graphic tablets are pressure-sensitive and can recognize up to 1024 pen pressure levels; the resolution of the drawing surface can be higher than 5000 dpi: this means that the designers’ creative and artistic technique can be expressed with no limitations imposed by the hardware.

The most recent devices are the Tablet PCs and the interactive displays - like the Wacom Cintiq - that have a monitor the designers can draw on with a special pen. These seem to be the ultimate input devices, since the feeling is immediate and the feedback is very similar to that of the pen and paper.

3D Models

One of the key factors for the reduction of the development times and costs is to cut the number of physical prototypes, that require very high investments. In order to do that, managers have to take decisions when the car is still "on paper".

While the technical decisions are taken with the help of virtual prototyping, the style of the car is evaluated with digital presentations, that can be static (bi dimensional photorealistic images), dynamic (movie clips) or interactive, with the virtual reality tools.

In order to create this kind of presentations a detailed digital model is required.

This model contains different data: the mathematical definitions of the geometries, the material information (textures and other parameters), the scene environment: camera position and target, illumination, ground plane , background, etc.

From this information it is possible to create a digital rendering, i.e. a photorealistic image that simulates the real physical interaction between the objects and the environment: lights, shadows, reflections, refractions, etc.

These images can be calculated in a static way, by using specific algorithms like Ray-Tracing or Global Illumination, or in real-time, by taking advantage of the CPU and graphic cards speed, using for example the OpenGL standard.

The static images require longer processing times, but can offer a very high quality and can be inserted in real environments by means of a photo editing process that creates a virtual photograph of the car.

It is also possible to mount a series of renderings to create an animated movie clip, using techniques very similar to those of Special Effects productions in cinema.

 On the other hand, the images generated in real-time can be used for interactive presentations, where the zoom and the perspective can be changed at one's pleasure. To handle detailed images, very powerful CPUs and graphic cards are required.

In the development process there are many different applications for the 3D models: from the concept visualization to the surfaces technical evaluation, to the finite elements analysis for the structural crashworthiness of the body.

Each of them requires a specific 3D model; it's not possible to use a 'universal' model, since the amount of information would be too large to be handled: for example it would be useless for a 3D model used for rendering purposes to contain data about the inner panels, the different sheet thicknesses or the physical properties of the materials.

Another interesting field of application of the digital technologies in car design is the virtual reality, where the interaction between the user and the computer generated output goes a step further.