Interesting video about the art involved in creating the Bugatti L’or Blanc. They talk about using porcelain and my first thoughts were about it breaking plus the daily wear, but they cover that later in the video.

-greg

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.

When I first saw this image I thought it was a Photoshop trick, but it seems to be an actual engine.

In Autoblog’s article about the World’s Largest Diesel Engine, where I saw this, they tell the story of the large engines used for cargo ships.

The turbo diesel engine pictured has 14 cylinders that produce a whopping 109,000 horsepower.

I think it’s interesting to see something made on such a large scale.

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.

Yesterday I uploaded my new website. This new website is built with WordPress and it uses the TwentyTen default template.

There are a couple of reasons why I decided to use WordPress, one of which is its ease of use. When I first built my old website I used a CMS, which at the time, was easy-to-use and did everything I needed it to do. But as my site grew and I decided to add a blog to it, the old CMS did not have a blog option so I added WordPress.

By adding WordPress, when it became time to update my website with new artwork I would have to update the old CMS and WordPress. This wasn’t a big deal at the time but what I started noticing was WordPress was more search engine friendly than my old CMS. Let me give you an example, in the world of search engine optimization one of the key elements are search engine friendly URLs. A search engine friendly URL will have keywords in all lower case and dashes separating each word. With my old CMS I had keywords in the URL but I also had special characters such as a question mark.

Example:

Now in these examples you can see the difference. They went to the same page but the WordPress URL is much more search engine friendly. Always keep in mind that search engines try to index everything whether you have a good URL structure or bad URL structure but where the differences come into play is when a search engine is trying to decide which website to put higher in the search results. Google looks at over 200 things when it’s comparing websites so what you want your site to do is to look less imperfect than your competitor.

Other things that I looked at with WordPress is that it’s very user-friendly, I actually use it over on AutomotiveArtists.com. Another great thing about WordPress is that it has great user support. In the process of converting my website over I had questions, a lot of them. One of my biggest questions is that since I had so many pages already made in the blog section all I wanted to do was add my art pages to WordPress but I didn’t want them to be in the blog section. This is where the great user support comes from, any time I had a question I did a search and someone out there already had an answer. Being able to quickly find answers to my questions really helped me out.

As far as the template design I went with the default TwentyTen template and made minor tweaks to it. I always liked this template, it just has a nice clean look about it.

Another deciding factor was page load speed. Recently Google came out with a page where you can test your page load speed. This page load speed ranks how quickly your page downloads on the scale from 0 to 100. When I first tried it on my old website I thought my website loaded pretty fast so I was expecting a high score. The score I got was a 60 but when I tested the WordPress blog version of my website I got an 89. So I started testing other websites that I have, some that are built in plain HTML and a couple of others made in WordPress. It seemed the WordPress sites always ranked higher than my non-WordPress websites. Test your site’s page load speed.

The thing that I’m doing now is setting up 301 redirects from my old CMS’s URLs over to the new WordPress URLs. As with most things with WordPress they have a plug-in that can help you do most anything, in this case they have a redirect plug-in that is helping me manage all my redirects. Anytime you change your URL structure, in this case going from an old website to the new website, it’s good to put in 301 redirects. Not only does this help users who click on an old link come to your new page but it also tells the search engines that you have permanently moved the old page to a new URL.

So now everything is set and I can get back to doing artwork. I got a couple of new things I want to show you but I didn’t want to post anything because if I posted it on the old side I had to transfer to the new site.

Anyway I hope you like the new site, that’s where I’ve been for the last couple weeks getting 135 pages transfered over, working on a test server and then moving everything back over.

Thanks, greg

This is a cool video trailer of my favorite car chase scene, the Steve McQueen/Bullitt chase scene, done in scale. A completed version is suppose to be ready this year, check the creator’s YouTube channel “emigre100” for updates.

I think everything has been cleared up now. So if you tried to get to my site and couldn’t, or tried to email me and it got returned, the web server going down was the problem.

I had seven sites on that server and what helped me is that I use web hosts that have the popular control panel called cPanel. cPanel has a backup utility that also helps restore your site when you move. I just needed to find another host using the same control panel.

Remember to do your backups on your site in case this ever happens to you.

Thanks for hanging in there with me!!
–greg