Today I read about Dean Jeffries passing away at 80. Dean was a legendary car builder who was behind such creations as the Mantaray, the Monkeemobile, the Green Hornet’s Black Beauty plus a lot of other cars. The first posting I read was on Autoblog and then one on Hot Rod Magazine’s site.

In 2009 I did a post about Dean’s new book called “Dean Jeffries: 50 Fabulous Years in Hot Rods, Racing & Film”.

I really like looking at vintage cars and trucks ads. The illustrations are the best due to their color and composition. Then there’s the distortion aspect of the cars when they are drawn to look longer and wider than they actually are.

I came across some ads on the website “vintage everyday“. If you have a link or two of some vintage automotive ad sites you think are cool please include them in the comments.

thanks, greg

Here is the finished artwork I call “Hot Rod Headlight“. A lot of time went into this one because of all the detail. I really like all the reflections in and around the headlight and the suspension. This artwork would have looked fine with a white background, I might do that later, but I chose to go with a charcoal black background for the pavement. The dimensions are 18″ x 24″.

This is an up-close image to show some of the detail. See what the artwork looked like half finished.

Here is a screenshot of what I’m working on now. It’s the headlight and front suspension of a 1932 Ford Hot Rod. You’ll notice about how much I’ve done and how much I have yet to do. I’ll keep you updated.

Your chance to own the original 1966 Batmobile.

This Batmobile is personally owned by George Barris is going up for sale at the Barrett-Jackson auction on January 13-20, 2012 in Scottsdale. As the description says, it the first time the original Batmobile has been up for sale.

What do you think it will go for?

Buster Keaton did a lot of great work but the movie that comes to mind when I hear his name is the movie Beach Blanket Bingo. I guess the reason I remember that one is because all the Ed Roth references with the hillbilly helmets and monster shirts. I found this image on Pinterest of Buster wearing a SurFink shirt.

This is a 1965 Ford Van I drew in a simple graphic style. I tried a different approach this time and I think it turned out pretty good.

My usual approach is to create a set of different gradients using various shades of the body color for the highlights and shadows. Instead, this time I drew all the shadows in black and all the highlights in white, then layered the body color over top. By adjusting the body color using the transparency setting, the white highlights now appear to be a shade of the body color.

The result is that the entire van color can be switched to another color just changing one solid color instead of changing and adjusting a bunch of gradients.

Below are examples of the van in orange, blue and red. I changed them all just by selecting the body color and changing it to another color.

The shadow and highlights are set up for light to medium colors but maybe with a few adjustments it could work with dark colors too.

Take care, greg

For the month of June, I wanted to try a little something different, so I’m giving away a 18″ x 24″ GTO Judge poster.

Note: I’ll go back to the regular giveaway after June. Good Luck!!

This is a one-color decal design for Dandy’s Drive-In. I did the artwork for this design some time ago and I’m just getting around to posting about it.

They sent a scanned concept of what they had in mind. I took what they sent and redrew it in Illustrator.

You may notice a difference in the font for the text “Dandy’s Drive-In” between the artwork and the scan. Not finding an exact font match for this text I came up with a few font options and one was chosen. We did discuss custom drawing the text to match the scan but they ended up really liking the font style that you see in the design.

Here you can see the shirt designs for did for them earlier.

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