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JimmyK's Nascar Racing 2003 Season Painting Tutorial

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    Time to start painting! For my Sponsor I've chosen Nabisco Ritz Crackers. I've found logos on the web that are pretty good. One thing to keep in mind when getting logos, try to find ones as big as possible. As a rule of thumb downsizing an image to fit will give you a better quality image than making a small image larger.

    In my case one of the logos didn't come in the 16 million colors that we need to use it on our car. To fix this go to the colors drop down menu in PSP, and select the increase color depth to 16 million. You can now use the logo on the car.

    First thing we need to choose is a base color. Here's a picture of the 2 logos I'm going to use, and from where I'll get my base color.

    Looks like the car will be red! I like the red from the Ritz cracker image so I'll use that.  I'll select the flood fill tool from the left side tool bar in PSP, and then use the eyedropper to get the red I want. Then all you have to do is flood fill the car body layer and the base paint is done. The bright red from the Nabisco logo is probably a good one for a secondary graphic. Speaking of graphics we have to figure out what we're going to put on this car. I look at what's out there on real cars to see if there's something I like. I found a fairly simple design on the #37 Friendly's car.  It has enough curves on it to show how to do them with PSP. Here's a picture of the real car:

    There's 3 colors to this car. I already have the red base paint done so that leaves 2, the white stripe and the black. Using colors in the logos I have I think the bright red will look good where the black is. Here's how I went about making the first layer of graphics:

First thing I do is select the layer I want to paint in using the drop down menu under "Layers". The one I want is called Graphics 1, and the check next to it tells me it is the current layer. See Figure A

                                         Figure A                                                         Figure B                                            Figure C

In order to make the curves I use the line tool set to "Bezier curve" Make sure that antialias is checked. By default the line tool is set to single line. To change it you must first get the "tool option" toolbar. Here's how. Right click on the tool bar to the left and select tool options. See figure B A small tool bar will appear named tool options. See figure C. In Figure C I have the settings I used to make the following curves on my car:

                                            Figure D                                                                                            Figure E

In Figure D I've already drawn the top curve for the upper graphics on the car. There's also a curve around the front wheel. The outline shown is what the Bezier curve gives you before you release the muse button. It shows the start and ending points plus how where and how far the line was "pulled" to make the curve. It sounds easy, but what you see took me about 3/4 of an hour to get it right. In Figure E I've changed my tool settings to "single line" and made a straight line from front to back.  There's a few things to do before we're done with this layer. If you notice in the picture of the real car the curve around the front wheel extends to under the headlight. This will be tricky. Here's where the car viewer comes in VERY handy. The hard part about this curve is that we have to match its radius (curve?) to one on the fender. The most common problem I run into is that I may get the curve's shape right, but its in the wrong spot. There's a couple of ways that you can "move" the curve to a different position. First one is draw the curve that same way you did the others then use the freehand tool (the one that looks like a lasso) and draw around the curve you want to move. once that is done cut the curve out then paste into the selection. The curve is still the same shape but now you can move it to where you want. The second method is to make the curve as a vector. Vectors can be moved around easily but they are drawn in a separate layer. No big deal really as long as you keep track of them. The one thing to keep in mind is that making curves is like racing, you need patience, patience and more patience. One of my team mates is driving the Jeff Gordon Dupont 200 anniversary car. It took him 6 hours to get the striping to where he wanted it.

                                                    Figure F

    After experimentation I found that the front curve could be drawn as a straight line. Figure F shows where it ended up. I then converted the vector layer to a raster one and named it "front curve".

    The original car has a stripe on it as well as the 2 colors. We'll do that next.