It's been quite a long while (possibly 4 years) since I've done any sort of artwork that I consider 'decent'. What I consider decent involves working on something for over one whole day, not scribbling for 5 minutes everyday till the end of the week. Anyway, for my artistic comeback, love of cars and the recent interest of Pop Art I gave this style of art a shot.
The artwork's central element and motivation is a car, so I chose a recent favourite, the Toyota MR2 SW20. The most prominent feature of Pop Art is smart toning/rendering and simplicity (and the bright colours of course). I've done rendering since primary school but never could do it properly. So the first step is desaturate the picture, and see it in black and white in various exposures. This way you can see which parts are the brightest, which are the darkest, and everything in between.
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| In photoshop, desaturate then use the treshold tool to adjust the 'exposure' of the picture |
Now, it's time to get hands-on, after drawing/tracing the car's outlines and prominent linework from shadows and lights, it's time to remove the lids off those markers and start rendering!
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| Using only 2 colours (orange & yellow) with black & gray |
It didn't too well like I expected, I'm still not 100% sure how to render it nicely like all those other Pop Art pieces. Then I remembered, simplicity... simplicity is very important in the colour palette of a Pop Artist.
So I've restricted to use only one colour:
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| The 'trick' worked surprisingly well |
Remember use black in only the darkest areas, leave white for the brightest and fill in whatever in between.
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| Car body done! Rims done! |
Working too much on photoshop/illustrator makes me use layers even when actually hand drawing. It makes altering/fixing up mistakes a lot easier. The background is also done in illustrator then coloured/detailed by hand.
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| Even manga today have elements done on the computer/3D programs |
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| Having too many colors can be a messy thing |
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| and so, simplicity is again, the key here |
...and the final product
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Tada!! |
Very nice work. I found this blog by searching for Pop Art and spotting a flyer I made when I worked for Poptastic, it led me to this page because it's up there at the top!
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