I did this sketch some time ago. It was done to help out another artist who needed a drawing of a hot rod firetruck for a photo booth cutout during a charity event. The sketch was enlarged and transferred to a plywood board which people would stand behind, so they looked like they were driving it, to get their picture taken. After emailing an image of the sketch, I packed away the original under some other sketches.

Recently running across it, I thought it would be cool to finish the sketch by drawing it in vector art. At the time, I was converting an old computer from Windows XP to Linux. The old computer ran good for years with XP, then after a system update it started shutting down without any warning. I worked with it for a while, doing reinstalls and updates, but the end result was always the same. This lead me to try Linux on the computer and it has been running fine ever since.

One of the applications I loaded on this computer was Inkscape. Inkscape is a free (open source) vector art program available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Think of it as a free alternative to Adobe Illustrator, the industry standard, and what I regularly use to create the artwork. I thought this would be a great project to switch gears and use Inkscape instead of Illustrator.

Inkscape is easy to use, the challenge for me was that I am so use to Illustrator, it took me a while to find out how to do some of the same things I do in Illustrator, in Inkscape. When I got stuck on something the answer was easy to find by just doing a search, Inkscape has a large support community out there.

I’m not finished with it yet but this is what I have so far, starting to add color to it now. I’ll keep working on it from time to time until I get it finished.

Here it is all finished, the 1950 Studebaker Bullet Nose artwork. The final art ended up being 24 x 18 inches.

I’m still using solid colors when doing my art and on this one I decided to step out the body color on the hood to help show the contour.

Find out more about Studebaker. On my previous post about this artwork, I included links for more information about who designed the bullet nose and the cars it appeared on.

Below is an bullet nose slideshow gallery from Flickr.

Here are a few screenshots of a 1950 Studebaker I’ve been working on. What great styling on these cars. When I see these, the first thing I look at is the front end, that bullet-nose front end is what make these cars stand out.

From what I can find out is that designer Bob Bourke created the bullet-nose design while working at Loewy Designs.

Raymond Loewy, who is the first industrial designer to be featured on the cover of Time Magazine, did a lot of design work for Studebaker throughout his career.

Here is a great post for more information about the bullet-nose design called “The Bullet Nose Years“.

This is the finished Thunderbird art I posted about earlier. It’s the front end of a 1960 Ford Thunderbird and as I said before, I was doing this piece in a graphic style. The finished art ended up being three colors, black as the line work, then the base color and a highlight color.

I added a white border so the print would come out to a general size, in this case 16×24, but I can also see it printed even larger with the white border trimmed. I think this artwork would add a cool dramatic statement hanging really big in a living room, conference room or play room.

For fun I went to PhotoFunia and played around with different scenes just to see how it would look in different settings.

April has been a busy month with launching the new website design. There is so much you need to do when you move from an old site to a new one, especially when your URLs change.

Between taking care of the new site, I have been squeezing in time to work on some new art. This is new Thunderbird art I’ve wanted to tell you about.

I’m trying something new on this piece. I’m trying to give it more of a graphic style by breaking down the colors to possibly three colors or maybe four colors. You can see were I am at here in the wireframe screen shot of the headlights.

I’m going to do all the black first and then come back and add in the color. If everything turns out right I should be done within a few days.

This is finished art of a Hudson car logo. In a previous post I wrote that I was so focused on getting a good up-close photograph of this logo that I forgot to make a note about the car.

After some research on different Hudson models I think the car was a 1953 Hudson Hornet. I say that because there is good image of a 1953 Hudson Hornet on Jay Leno’s Garage website plus another site and you’ll notice a similar pattern of line work in the chrome around the logo.

The artwork is 18 x 24.

This is new artwork I did of a 1956 Ford Fairlane Sunliner. (You can see an in-progress image of this artwork on a previous post.) I like two-tone paint and side chrome treatment on these cars. The size of the artwork is 18 x 24. Below is an image showing some of the detail.

I found this cool commercial on YouTube called “Two Fords” that showcases the new 1956 Fords for that year.

The December contest winner comes from Edwards, CA. They chose to win the “1958 Cadillac“ poster.

This marks the 114th winner since I started the poster give-a-way in July 2000. I look forward in giving away more posters in 2011.

A new winner for January will be chosen at the end of the month so enter now.

It’s a new year and time to get things rolling with some new automotive art. This is a screenshot of what I am working on now.

Thank you for your support and I wish everyone a great New Year for 2011!

Have a great holiday!
greg