It’s amazing the detail he puts into these kits. You can see images of all twelve in the Finkster Forum on EdRothWorld.com.

Weldon has also put together a poster made up of photos of these models. He sent me one and they are really cool! Check out his Ebay auction.

He sent me a link to Purdue University’s website. On their website is a page showing the corporate partners for the Industrial Advisory Board. Sandwiched in between the Ford logo and Honeywell logo you’ll see the All American Dynamics logo.

Not only is it impressive to see the logo you designed with these big names, but is also impressive to see someone you know on such a board. Very cool, Steve!

This is a photo from Michael Paul Smith’s photo set on Flickr. What’s impressive about this photo is that the cars and the buildings are models. He takes these amazing photos of car models without the help of Photoshop. He says he uses the oldest trick in the special effects book and that is to line up the model with an appropriate background.

See the rest of his photos here on his slideshow.

Chris Duke of Motorz posted on his Facebook page a request for anyone to Photoshop Peter of “Family Guy” onto his new “Season 3″ photo.

Chris is a cool guy that I have gotten to know on Facebook and from his show Motorz so I thought I would take him up on his request.

The trick was getting the shirt to fit around Peter’s neck in a natural looking way. After a few tweaks here and there I was pleased with how it turned out.

Chris just posted an article titled “Photoshop The Host” with all the details. See the image I did at the top of the page beside Chris’s picture and at the top of the images below.

You can give it a try too, he has details on his website. Whether you do artwork or not check out Chris’s videos on Motorz. You can also check him out on Facebook and Twitter.

Smart Car Drifting in Japan

The new 2010 Mustang Customizer is out and it is one of the best configurators I have played with this year.

So what makes this configurator better than the others? First of all it has lots of options. Options for the car, options for the background and also options for different effects you can apply to the car like a burnout, dirt, and smoke.

The other nice thing is that it loads fast. Sometimes when configurators have as many options as this one, it will take forever to load.

The one little thing I think could have been done better is the parts side navigation. I kept having to chase down the “selected parts” link once the box resized itself. It would be great if it stayed the same size or either expanded just from the top down.

It also has nice share options so you show your friends what you created. Here is a link to one of the Mustangs I did. If you go and create one, come back and post it in the comments so I can check it out.

The basic idea with these setting is that the higher the setting, the better the image quality and the lower the setting the lower the quality. Along with the image quality is the file size. The higher the setting also means a larger file size and lower the setting means a smaller file size.

The balance is to have the best image quality with the lowest possible file size.

So a common practice, and one I have used over the years, was to go with a middle-of-the-road setting of 50. That way you got good image quality without having a file that was large and made your site load slow.

I recently came across this great article from Sergey Chikuyonok that I wanted to share called “Clever JPEG Optimization Techniques“.

The thing that stood out for me in this article was when Sergey wrote that when you save an image in Photoshop under 50, it uses an additional optimization algorithm, so if you are saving an image that has small, high-contrast details it is better to set the quality setting to at least 51.

In the article, there are some images to show you the difference between that 50 and 51 quality setting. You will be surprised at the difference.

The logos are posted by “Depression Press”. See more great design elements from “Depression Press” on their photostream.

See the new design I launched for AutomotiveArtists.com this week. This is something I have been working on for the last couple of months.

Not only does the site have a new look with better navigation but it also has new features, which include an image upload for artist’s news stories, enhanced site search, and improved Artists Index. Using WordPress for this new site allows for user’s comments to be posted.

One of the biggest improvements for me is to be able to make updates daily, depending on Artist’s submission, instead of weekly as done previously. Updates can be subscribed to by email or by RSS feed.

Pages also now have popular share options at the bottom of each page, allowing users the ability to quickly and easily share pages on Digg, Yahoo Buzz, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and more.

Below are a few images to show you how the site has evolved over the years. I remember when I started this site; I use to manually do all the updates on pages in plain HTML.

I would have to say about 80% of the work on this new site was moving the content from the old site over into the new one. Now since I have this project completed I can get back to doing my automotive artwork.

Wallswaps.com is a great site created by the people at Erskine Design.

The principal is simple, just send them some stuff, any stuff, and they will send you one of their badges and then put your stuff on their wall for all the see. Not only is this a great idea for Erskine Design to promote their agency but it is also a great way to promote what you do too.

I sent them three posters of my automotive artwork and some business cards.

This is my badge.

As far as web design goes, I think they did a great job with this site. It has a really unique design. Go ahead and send them some stuff.

To get some of my stuff you can enter for your chance at one of posters and/or I will send you some of my business cards.