LEONARDO CASTILHO
AIRBRUSH RENDERING

Leonardo continues his tutorial here, showing the often overlooked tools of the airbrush and gouache.  These traditional tools of the designer have largely been overtaken by digital methods...such as Photoshop.  The theory behind their use however is identicle, and it is no bad idea for a designer to at least try them a few times.  You never know how long the next power cut might last!!

 

It is at this stage that the drawing begins to come alive in front of your eyes. By using a fine paintbrush and a little gouache (which you may need to thin a little with water) you can begin to pick out highlights and surface folds and body shut lines. As with the marker stage care should be taken here to produce crisp line work, although small errors can be corrected by using a scalpel to carefully scrape off the gouache.

Here you can see that the drawing is very nearly complete. The details in the headlamps and wheels as well as the grille has been picked out and emphasised using the gouache. When applying the highlights to the door shuts notice that this does not continue fully to the bottom of the door. This is because as you move down the surface edge of the door it will reflect less of the light source back to your view point.

The very final stage of the drawing is to pick out a few subtle highlights, again using the gouache. These highlights actually represent areas that the vehicle is directly reflecting the sunlight back to you. This stage tends to have more impact if you keep it very subtle and try to maintain a little order to where it is applied. For instance, you can see that the highlights in the grill all fall in one line.
A good piece of advice once you have read this tutorial is too look at photos of vehicles, or even go outside and walk around real a real car. Try to recognise the elements of lighting you have learned in this tutorial. The way reflections and colour work on different surfaces, depending on the angle you view them, as well as how highlights from the sun tend to fall on a vehicle.
Best of luck!

Once you have completed the marker stage you can begin to add gradients of colour to the image. There are two common ways to do this when producing a drawing by hand. With pastels or by airbrush. The advantage of using airbrush is that you can achieve much smoother colour gradients, however, unlike pastel work, this cannot be erased so care has to be taken. When applying the gradients you must think about which areas of the vehicle shall be most reflective. This is where you must apply the least amount of colour. In this example you can see for instance that the far side of the bonnet where our angle of view is extremely acute there is very little colour applied. This transitions to almost near black on the near side of the bonnet. Similarly on the body side, very little colour has been applied just above the horizon line., transitioning to almost completely black as we travel up the surface to the windows.