LEONARDO CASTILHO
AIRBRUSH RENDERING

In this tutorial Leonardo Castilho will guide you through the technique he uses to produce quick air brush renderings. Leonardo has been producing this kind of artwork for two years after being inspired by the work of Chip Foose. To see other examples of Leonardo's please visit Car Design News where he has an online folio.
For this tutorial Leonardo has used materials Letraset marker paper, a ball point pen, Art markers, an airbrush and gouache.

 

The first stage in the process (shown above) is to work out your design in a loose and fast sketch, where you can concentrate on the design rather than careful line work. From there you can use this sketch as an underlay for your final line work. This has been drawn onto Letraset marker paper using a normal black biro. This drawing will form the base of your rendering so should be produced with care for the line quality. You should still aim however to retain some sketch like feeling to the line work to avoid the rendering looking too rigid. It may also be an idea to use ellipse guides on for the wheels.

After completing the line work it is time to start adding some colour with marker pens. Start by adding some very light blue to any upward facing surface. This helps give the feeling that these surfaces are reflecting the sky. You can also add a light brown colour to any surface which is angled downwards beneath the horizon line and shade these with a light brown. This helps give the impression of these surfaces reflecting the ground, and gives a classic chrome ball look. You can still be reasonably fast and loose at this stage since in the later stages you will be able to tighten up the rendering. You may also notice that the interior has only been shaded when looking through the front window. When glass is viewed from a very acute angle it tends to reflect much more than when viewed at 90%. Because of this the side windows have been left light to give the impression they are reflecting the sky in the distance behind the car.

Once you have completed the colour reflections you can begin to block in the actual colour of the car, in this case black. You can apply this colour anywhere on the vehicle that is not receiving a lot of light and reflections from the sky or the ground (it is often forgotten that the ground can actually light your vehicle from beneath due to reflected sunlight). Since at this stage you will be picking out key design elements and lines (and in this case using an unforgiving black marker pen) you should take care at this stage to produce crisp line work. Also remember to test your marker on a separate sheet of your marker paper first in order to test how much the ink is going to bleed.

The beginnings of the first sketch.  Drawn in Biro.