Say hello to Vaughan, author of four (!) concepts on conceptsalad, ASC, Chevy Hustle, Flow and Cobra 2009. As you can see, Vaughan is improving his skills massively and today he’s sharing his very own Photoshop rendering technique. It’s rather quick and the result is awesome. Vaughan Ling is a student at CCS in Detroit and you can watch his work on his blog (updated almost daily) – Vaughan Ling doin his thing. Enjoy!

1. Start by sketching your car on a new layer in Photoshop. Alternatively, scan in your lines, and put the layer on multiply mode so the white of the paper is transparent. I prefer to start with something more gestural to allow for flexibility down the road. Make sure to flip horizontally to check perspective.

2. Fill a layer behind the lines with a dark tone

3. A directional light arrow helps to remind where the light source is. Also a dab of white and black serves as a reference for your upper and lower value limit as well as easy color pickin (alt while in brush mode). Take a large soft brush and bluntly brushed on a lighter value on the top of the car. We are going general to specific with values.

4. Use polygon lasso to quickly mask off some hard edges. Use a soft brush against the hard edge to bring out crisp highlights.

5. Intensify the light values being careful not to overdo it. Keep your lightest values to a single area, then trail off = hotspot)

6. Use pen tool to mask off the windows, then fill with dark gray, on a new layer. Add a very faint ground reflection on downward facing surfaces.

7. Glass is usually shinier than body, so I used a hard brush to make crisper reflections. Remember to follow the same lighting you used on your body ie don’t put a highlight on glass if the body surrounding it is in darkness.

8. I noticed the wheels weren’t sitting right where I drew them. No biggie, lasso selected the rear quarter panel highlight and adjusted it’s position. (Aren’t layers so handy)

9. Used the poly lasso again, in combination with the soft brush to describe the fenders. Also I changed the front end design, again keeping revisions on a new layer.

10. Getting there, painted in the new front end and loosely indicated wheel spokes.

11. I Decided the black and white was a little bland, so I messed with color balance and added a red-orange fiahblazin stripe over the car. I tried to keep the orange secondary light contained, so it didn’t interfere with the main light too much. It would be wonderful not to cover up all that hard work you just did.

12. Used color dodge to intensify the FIAHh! To finish, I added assorted filters: glass filter on the fiah band makes it look hot, a bit of unsharpen mask gives everything a bit more crispness and makes you look like a better artist than you really are. Don’t forget to sign it and add your blog url as a shameless plug.

That’s it! Hope you learned something from this, good luck on your next rendering!