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Insight
Creating a Racecar Illustration with Illustrator
Dateline: February 15, 2006
Version: Adobe Illustrator CS
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| San Franciso-based illustrator John Mattos took advantage of racing photos to create stylistic gradients and realistic perspective in Illustrator.
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Mattos imported images into Illustrator
and traced over the shapes using the Pen
tool. He concentrated on parts of the images
such as the face and hand of the racecar
driver and created the basic shapes by paying
close attention to the lighting and the interaction
of light. “You have to virtually eliminate
most detail from reference images, otherwise
it doesn’t look posterized,” Mattos notes.
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Mattos created reflections on the helmet
and windshield by adding Linear and Radial
gradients to the strap and top of the helmet,
and created the highlight on the glass using a
white-to-gray Linear gradient at 21% Opacity.
He constructed the car body and tires from
grouped vector shapes referenced from a
scan of an old Ferrari. For the swift lines of
the tires, he drew relatively straight-edged
shapes and filled them with a 46% Opacity
gray-to-black Linear gradient set to 177
degrees. He added highlights to the tires
by grouping the paths making up the tread
marks and applying a black-to-blue Linear
gradient at angles that added to the car’s
sense of motion.
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Using a photo of a track to help determine the
perspective, Mattos traced the general shape of
a stripe and drew two long curvilinear shapes to
act as shadows for the grooves in the stripe of the
track. He filled the first shape to the left with gray
at 36% Opacity, and filled the right shape with a
light gray-to-gray Linear gradient at 16 degrees.
Without using reference material, he drew the
shape for the shadow underneath the car on the
track and filled it with blue-gray at 52% Opacity
to simulate the natural transparency of shadows.
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For a background, Mattos used reference photos
scanned in as Bitmap TIFFs, such as the trees,
clouds, and mountains. For trees, he traced over
the details of the foliage to create many separate
shapes, filled each with brown, olive, or mineral
green, then layered the shapes to add dimension
and scale. He created the mountains in the back
left using the same process. The clouds were simply
filled with pink-to-purple Linear gradients at
various angles. The color of the sky was achieved
by filling a path around the upper edges of the
document with a white-to-coral Linear gradient at
110 degrees.
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The final image is shown at left.
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