MADness #51- Rejected Cars!

Rev those engines, race fans! It’s monday, and that means it’s time for another agonizingly slow lap around my work for MAD Magazine. This week we are shifting gears with what was my first all-digital piece for the magazine, “Rejected Characters from Cars”, written by Jacob Lambert and first appearing in MAD #467, July 2006.

When I say “all digital” I just mean the finished art. I still did the pencil sketches with actual pencils on actual paper, but after scanning the roughs I did do any physical inking on bristol board like I usually do. I wbt right on top of the pencils with Photoshop to do the finals. This being a parody of the Pixar movie “Cars”, I needed to try and approximate the look of the movie characters as much as I could. Line art was not going to do that.

I also remember doing the final art on this piece while I was in the San Francisco area for my niece’s wedding. I was still working on a laptop with a Wacom Intuos tablet. I also remember I had great aspirations to map out the reflections in each car to match the environment, the cars next to each, the eyes in the hood, etc. just like the ones in the Cars film. However after I spent the better part of an entire day painting “Guzzle: the 3 miles-per-gallon Winnebago” I realized I did not have the time to do this with 14 cars to go. Therefore I had to just paint each car with a generic reflection pattern, freehand in many cases. The end result wasn’t anywhere near as accurate to the Cars movie look as I wanted, but more of a cartoon interpretation of it. “Guzzle” is the only car I spent as much time as I wanted on, and it is the closest to the look I really wanted, but I was able to fake it all right. Just for fun I saved various images of is “Scotty Scofflaw: The Booted, Ticket-Plastered Sedan” at the time so I could do a step by step breakdown of the process of doing one of the cars. Here that is:

First, I started with some reference of an appropriate sedan:

The cars in “Cars” are obviously anthropomorphic, with human features that take precedent over the structure of the car itself. The integrity of the car still needed to be maintained, like it was made of rubber and not metal, and would stretch and move with expressions and animation. Pixar took a lot of liberties with the front ends of the cars to accommodate the mouths. Here’s my sketch of the car with the expression and action needed to ‘sell the gag’:

I started adding flat color under the pencil drawing layer, separating areas into their own layers. Because I wanted to maintain the mechanical lines of the car’s structure, I would use the vector tool to draw precise contours and then transform that to a selection, using a light feathering of the selection to avoid a jaggy edge:

I continue to add the flat color, but also am now doing a little gradation work in the windshield and the ‘eyelids’. The eyes are the key to the life of the car, so I wanted to get that part right and as close to the film as I could. For the eyes I used ellipse selections I would save and then scale down for the pupils. The Pixar cars have eyes that are very concave, like little bowl depressions in the windshield with a lens over the top, like a real eye. I tried to capture this by offsetting the pupil in the iris and adding shadows to give some depth:

Now I lose the pencil lines and can really start the rendering:

I apologize for the jump right to nearly fully rendered car. I did not anticipate doing a step-by-step at the time, and did not save enough image in stages. What I did here was use the wand tool to select areas like the body color, then use the lasso tool to remove areas of the selection in reflective shapes, soften the edges and use the airbrush tool to lay in highlight reflections, dark reflections and other values. I seperated highlight reflections and shadow reflections on their own layers. In some cases I just went in with the paintbrush tool and hand painted the reflection, which took away from the realistic look but was a time issue:

I added the final touches. The tickets are a real ticket I got from a law enforcement website, manipulated and twisted around:

Here is the final car painting in position. I added the shadows on the ground to the background image:

These are a far cry from the hyper realistic metal surfaces on the actual film’s cars. No wonder Pixar never returned my calls when I wanted to apply for a job there!

Toon in next week when we return to the world of full movie parodies, capes, and tights!