Welcome to the video tutorials section of the How to Draw Cars site. Here you will find our latest “How To’s” on creating the best car design drawings you can. If you like the videos, want to give a thumbs up, comments or subscribe to our channel, please visit our YouTube channel here.
Race Car Livery Design with Black Wheel Marker Demo
This video is cover the process of race car livery design, hoe to sketch and render black wheels and how to change your design process to be more creative.
If you’re a team owner or manager and are looking to work with someone on a new race car livery design, contact me at : https://www.michaelsantorodesign.com
For automotive designers, one of the most exciting aspects of the job is the ability to be close to racing. Many car manufacturers go racing, sponsor race teams and are involved in motor sports in some way. If you are a motor sports fan and a car designer, getting to work on a race program is the ultimate thrill.
This video walks you through the process of creating the race car livery design for a pair of Audi RS3 race cars. The first part covers a more traditional approach to race car livery design. It shows sketching a car over a package drawing and then bringing that rough sketch into Adobe Illustrator to create the presentation rendering to show the client.
The second part of the video cover a more radical, creative approach to race car livery design using a fine art process. This process was focused on capturing the , speed, emotion and spirit of racing and the challenges of trying to transpose that spirit into a real world race car livery design. The video also covers how to sketch and render black wheels using markers. This is the first How to Draw Cars tutorial that features a marker demo. While it is not a comprehensive tutorial on the process, it does cover the basics of how to achieve the look of black wheel in your car design drawings.
Car Design Drawing – Secrets of Drawing a Convertible in Perspective
This video covers the basic steps of how to draw a convertible sports car in perspective. Drawing a convertible in perspective for young designers can be very daunting and intimidating because the interior is visible.
Many young designers do not spend a lot of time drawing automotive interiors. Interiors can be very difficult because it’s the opposite of the exterior. With automotive exterior design drawing, the goal is create a believable, solid looking volume in a 2 dimensional space. With automotive interior design, the goal is the opposite. You want to try and create a believable negative volume where that the driver and passengers will inhabit. Drawing a convertible in perspective brings these two unique challenges into the same drawing.
Doing a front, two point perspective drawing of a convertible can be one of the most difficult views to master of all the views car designers have at their disposal. The perspective itself fights the wedge shape of many car designs so the car wants to get bigger as it goes back in space and the perspective wants to make it smaller.
Moreover, you cannot draw a convincing automotive design drawing of a convertible without including the interior and showing the interior through the windshield. This in itself can deter aspiring automotive designers from trying to represent their convertible design ideas. The video covers how to build a structure or scaffolding to insure your perspective is correct. Then shows how to build wheels within that structure to insure your wheels and body relate. Putting an interior in your drawing as well as making the car look solid and grounded are also techniques covered in the video.
Car Design Drawing – Secrets of Drawing a Car in Perspective
This video covers the basic steps of how to draw a car in perspective. Drawing a car in perspective for young designers can be very daunting and intimidating.
Doing a front, two point perspective drawing of a car can be one of the most difficult views to master of all the views car designers have at their disposal. The perspective itself fights the wedge shape of many car designs. The car wants to get bigger as it goes back in space. The perspective wants to make it smaller. Tough stuff.
The video covers how to build a structure or scaffolding to insure your perspective is correct. Then shows how to build wheels within that structure to insure your wheels and body relate. Putting an interior in your drawing as well as making the car look solid and grounded are also techniques covered in the video.
This video was sponsored by Mark P from the UK. Mark wanted his How to Draw Cars tutoring session to be shared on Youtube.
Mark came to the How to Draw Cars site and paid for the lesson. Then asked if I could record the demonstration over his drawing showing him where he needs to improve and post it for everyone else to see.
This was a very kind gesture. Luckily we wanted to do a video for the channel that focused on drawing a car in two point perspective. That’s just what Mark needed to improve.
If you’d like to have your tutoring session recorded and posted on our channel, send me an email below.
Car Design Drawings – Speed Form Inspiration
This video is about how to draw speed forms to improve your car design drawings.
Many students are motivated to draw speed forms but feel blocked when it comes to knowing exactly what to draw. Using different inspirational forms outside the realm of cars and car design can provide the needed catalyst to jump start your sketching and creativity.
For this video, we cover 3 forms of sea life. I show how they can be inspiration for drawing speed forms whose techniques are the foundation of any car design drawing.
Practicing your speed forms provide 2 important lessons to the aspiring car designer. They improve your line quality so you can get your lines to flows and look fast.
Secondly, using sea life for inspiration encourages the aspiring car designer to develop new form vocabularies opening the way for truly original car design shapes when you go back to drawing cars.
The video uses a great white shark, a whale shark and a ray to show how these timeless forms can be the basis of speed form development. If you find a great form of sea life that you use for the basis of your speed forms or your car design drawings, be sure to let us know in the comments section.
If you have an idea for a How to Draw Cars video, please email or let a note in the comments section. We want to get you drawing cars like a pro so the more you tell us the kind of car design drawing videos you are looking for, then better our videos will be.
Car Design Drawings – Variations on a Theme
This video covers how to generate variations of your car design drawings using a window as a light box.
For this video, we use the coupe sketch that was generated in the Improve My Car Sketch video. A new car design drawing is done that creates a new front end design on the original body side. Several methods for creating the copy of the original car design sketch are discussed. These include tracing paper and an animators light box. Because not everyone has access to a variety of art materials like different kinds of tracing paper or vellum, or a light box, an alternative to these is shown.
A window is used as a light box to allow the car designer to trace the original newsprint car design drawing. A new sheet of newsprint is placed over the original sketch the the original sketch can then be traced to allow a new front end design to be generated quickly and easily. This new front end is more sympathetic to the body side of the car. It curvier and carries the theme to the body side through and around the front end of the car.
The window as a light box is a very effective way for the young aspiring car designer to create many variations of their design themes. This video shows you how to generate variations of your car design drawing using this technique. All that is needed is a pad of drawing paper, a pencil and some tape. This technique is great for creating many variations of your transportation design sketches using the same base underlay car drawing.
Car Design Drawing – Improve My Car Sketch
This video covers improving the line quality, line weight and drawing wheels in car design drawings.
For this video, a student sketch of a sports car is redrawn to show the differences between how to use the three basic elements of car design drawings: line weight, line quality and drawing wheels to improve your sketches.
Drawing cars is hard. Really hard. And doing car design drawings, drawing cars that do not exist in the real world yet, is even harder. Doing it correctly can be one of the most rewarding things to achieve if cars and design are your passion.
This video shows you how to improve each of the basic elements of car design drawings. It gives tips and tricks to get your sketches looking professional. It shows the importance of drawing from your shoulder to get your sketches and the quality of your lines to flow across the page.
The importance of line weight is discussed. How to vary the line weight can in your car design drawings to tell the story of your design. Lastly, the importance of drawing good quality eclipses in your car design drawings is discussed.
All these elements are brought together in one sketch to show how they work together to make your car design drawings the best they can be.
Be sure to subscribe to the channel.
Car Design Drawings – Secrets of Drawing Better Wheels
I’ve noticed a lot of the students in the How to Draw Cars tutoring program struggle with the drawing of wheels and tires, whether in the side view or in perspective views. A poorly drawn set of wheels and tires can ruin an otherwise excellent car design drawing so you want to make sure you know how to draw wheels and tires as best you can.
This How to Draw Cars video features a demo on how to create better wheels in your car design drawings. There is a simple technique to help you create round circles and smooth ellipses.
Of course the only real way to get better at drawing is to draw, a lot. And practicing your wheels and tires in both side and perspective views should be part of any aspiring car designers drawing routine.
The video covers the two different way of drawing a wheel in perspective. The first is where the vertical axis is the long axis. The second is where the horizontal axis of the wheel is the long axis. Each is view dependent and the video covers which to use when in your car design drawings.
One of the most important things to take away from Secrets of Drawing Better Wheels video is how easy it is to draw wheels when you draw from your shoulder. As with developing line quality to draw you cars, the same skills come into play when you draw wheels.
It’s also impossible to draw a clean, aesthetically pleasing wheel by drawing from your hand. You need to move your whole arm to get the gesture of the circle or ellipse in one motion. Practice as shown in the video to master this skill.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Car Design Drawings – Secrets to a Better Side View Drawing
In this video, “Car Design Drawings – Secrets to a Better Side View Drawing”, you’re a shown an “overlay demo”. In this demo the instructor offers drawing and design improvements over a student drawing of a small, compact sporty pickup truck.
The improvements focus on how to draw cars so your side views are much more three-dimensional, realistic and professional.
Each aspect of the drawing and design is reviewed. In the example shown, positive aspects of the vehicle’s design are pointed out as well as the areas where the design can be improved. This process is repeated for the drawing technique.
For the design, the upper section of the vehicle, including the cab, DLO (day light opening or shape of the side glass), hood and overall gesture are commended. The lower section of the vehicle is called out for not matching the uniqueness of the upper and targeted for improvement.
For the drawing technique, the truck is rendered in a very flat way. It lacks a sense that the vehicle is a three dimensional object in space. In “Car Design Drawings – Creating a More 3-D Side View Design”, 6 distinct ways of improving your side view car design drawings are described and shown.
These include:
Creating a more realistic side view of the windshield;
Expressing the interior volume of the passenger compartment;
Adding plan view to the front and rear ends and showing the details;
Drawing the wheels on the opposite side of the vehicle to create more depth;
Moving the center axel point inward to create deep dish wheels adding more overall drama to the sketch.
Therefore, if you are looking to take your side view car design drawings to the next level, this video is a must see!
Car Design Drawings – Line Quality Demo (Ferrari LaFerrari) Pt 1
In Part 1 of this video, “Car Design Drawings – Line Quality Demo (with Ferrari La Ferrari)”, you are shown a demonstration of what a car design drawing looks like when it’s drawn from your hand vs. what a car design drawing looks like when drawn from your shoulder.
Drawing cars from your shoulder is the single biggest way to effect the quality of your drawings. This video shows two drawings of the same car, one drawn using my hand and one drawn from my shoulder. I wanted to eliminate any biases about the design and have you focus on the drawing itself. For this How to Draw Cars demo I choose a car everyone recognizes, the hyper-car, the Ferrari La Ferrari. As a result, when I am done you can compare which drawing looks more like your car design drawings and which drawing looks more like they way you wished your car design drawings looked.
Why We Draw Cars the Way We Do
You might be asking yourself why we draw cars from our hand in the first place? The answer is, as children we learned to draw with from our hands because this is the way we learned to write. We scratched a crayon across the paper. As we gained more and more motor control our scratching became printing on line in a very controlled way. This works great if your 4 and want to write your name. It’s a disaster if your 14 or 24 and want to draw like a pro car designer. Especially if know one ever tells you there is another way.
This How to Draw Cars video is designed to enlighten you that the professional car design drawings you see online as the result of a very specific way of drawing. In the second part of this tutorial, I will teach you the secrets used by all the top design schools to train their freshman students to draw from their shoulders.
Be sure not to miss Pt 2 of this highly instructional series.
Car Design Drawings – Secrets of Improving Your Line Quality Pt 2
This is part two of a video covering improving the line quality in car design drawings.
In Part 1 of this video, “How To Draw Cars – Line Quality Demo (with Ferrari LaFerrari)”, you are shown a demonstration of what a car design drawing looks like when it’s drawn from your hand. Then the same car is used to create a car design drawing drawn from your shoulder.
In part two, we cover the secrets of how to improve the quality of your line work in your car design drawings utilizing two main exercises. The first is to stop drawing cars. Replace drawing cars with drawing speed forms. The video goes over what speed forms are. It also covers how they will teach you to draw in a new, different and most importantly, professional way.
Change Your Drawing Materials
The second “secret” to improve the line quality of your car design drawings is to change the materials you are using to draw with. Replace the No. 2 pencils and lined notebook paper with artist materials like soft leaded, colored pencils and a large newsprint pad. Bringing both these changes to your car design drawings will, in the long run, bring your work to the next levels.
In conclusion, if you’re tired of not seeing any improvement in the quality of your car design drawings, or your drawings lack the energy and flow of the sketches you admire online, try these exercises out for yourself and let me know how it works for you.
Car Design Drawings – Using a Variety of Line Weights
This is part 3 of a video covering improving the line quality in car design drawings. This video focuses on how to use a variety of line weights to make your car design drawings the best they can be.
This How to Draw Cars video features a demo over a pickup sketch. It shows the difference between a drawing that uses the same line weight throughout and one where line weights vary.
This is a drawing sent in by one of our students where the design is being hindered by the lack of line quality. Specifically the fact that all the lines are the same weight. The original sketch really suffers from using the same line weight to create the refection pattern, shading and shape and details of the car. This creates confusion where as a designer you should strive to create clarity. The video demo shows how we can do this better.
The goal of this How to Draw Cars video is to see if we can get the drawing to be as good as the design by using a variety of line weights and shading tones.
Keys to Car Design Drawing Success
As a car designer, you have to have the ability to work with various line weights at any given time when you are sketching. You need a variety of line weights in your technique to do this effectively.
As you sit down to begin to do some car design drawings, remember you trying to tell a story: The story of something that does not exist in the world, your car design. The more clearly you can tell this story, the better chance you will be successful at someone understanding what your design is all about.
The keys to this success are :
Always draw from your shoulder first
Start out with light lines and build your sketch up from them
Vary your line weights and shading for the different elements of your sketch
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