Drawing Cars in Photoshop Tips

Learning how to do something new can be difficult. I have been drawing most of my life and I still am not perfect. Sometimes it is just hard to understand how you can take a real object in the 3D world and transform that into a 2D image while still having it look 3D. Oy vey, it can be down right frustrating. However, this article is focused on sometime more specific then just drawing in general but how to draw cars.

Find a reference!

I have always found drawing cars difficult and I am sure there are other out there just like me. And one thing I’ve found very helpful when drawing is having a reference. An art teacher I had in my first semester of college said that when people draw from memory, they tend to distort whatever they are trying to draw. For example if someone tries to draw a bottle from memory, they won’t draw the bottle they saw on the kitchen counter earlier that morning but a stereotypical. You know, the one that is just skinny at the top and fat at the bottom. Yes that the typical bottle shape but the bottle the person saw was a deer park water bottle which has it’s own shape just like a coke bottle has it’s own shape.

The same thing applies to cars. It use to be whenever I drew cars, I would draw this oval with four circles. What car like that exists in the real world? That’s not a car but my stereotypical image of a car. If you want to learn to draw a car you need to find a corvette zr1 or at least a picture. Any car will do but you need a reference! You can’t trust your memory alone. Eventually you’ll be able to draw pretty well from memory after some study and practice.

Tracing can help you learn

Drawing cars in Photoshop can be easier because you have your reference photo right there next to your drawing and even draw on a layer over the original image. Yes that would technically be tracing but my art teacher also said that sometimes to learn to draw something you need to trace it and get the feel of how the proportions and prescriptive works in the image.

The Pen Tool

I have found that when drawing objects in Photoshop, it’s easiest to use the pen tool to get the outline of the car.

Another thing I’ve come across that would be good to try would be, instead of using the brush tool to color, the Gradient Tool can get you more of a realistic chrome look.