Virtual Tuning Mania

One of the many trends that came along with the Fast & Furious movies and the Need For Speed Underground series of games is the “art” of tuning and modifying your car to look as stupid and ridiculous as possible!!!

By that I mean the addition of ’shark fin’ like spoilers, ‘dragon’ like body-kits full of air vents and grille and the necessary addition of hundreds of stickers of performance (therefore expensive) part brands that your car will never have. A must ‘mod’ is the neon lights under the car! Look dad, my little Seat has been captured by UFOs! Look how it glows!

So it’s bloody typical: you can have a Honda Civic that values up to 3,000€ at the most and still have another 6,000€ worth of tuner stupidity mounted on it!! The car looks like it can rocket up to 60mph in less than 3 seconds whereas reality brings that figure up to something more than 8 seconds. And you tweak it, tune it, buy this spark plug and that exhaust pipe, tweak it some more and tune it some more till one day the poor bastard falls apart.

New Car-Toons

Hell yeah! My Car-tooning mania still goes on and strong!

My latest work is the 2007 Mini Cooper S. I’ve done this on my holidays last August, as I was drinking coffee on a beach cafe and a gorgeous red mini was parked near by. I decided to sketch it on a napkin. Later on it was all Photoshop long hours of work.

Much earlier than the mini, I’ve sketched a Nissan 350Z which was an on/off job for me due to heavy workload. But I’ve got it done finally, and this is the final product. The original sketch was done in May ‘08 but the actual illustration took me over 4-5 months to complete.

I hope you like them both

On the works now is a 1976 Toyota Celica ST, which is actually a commission for a friend that owns one and regularly races it on historic rally races. Stay tuned

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The return of the Scirocco?? NOT!

Okay just to set things right:

This is a true SCIROCCO! (the mkII model of the series)

and this is NOT a Scirocco:

Unfortunately Volkswagen has named their new hatch as Scirocco But does it have any relation to the one and only and true Scirocco? I guess not!

Autobianchis in Japan ???

In all honesty, what car you would least expect to be imported in Japan? What European car you would give a zero percent possibility to catch on a Japanese street?

You would never ever think that Autobianchi’s A112 got imported in Japan, would you? No, I guess not! Well think again, cause the photos

Ford Escort mkII RS2000 toon

For quite some time now I wanted to do an illustration of a Ford Escort mkII RS2000. Now I’ve always said that the mkII Escort is one of my favorite cars of all time. It is also one of my future projects; to buy restore and race one.

So falling in to the car-toon obsession that I’m happily experiencing these days, I’ve decided to have a go at making a toon illustration of my fave car. So my number two toon is the Ford Escort mkII RS2000 (pictures above, on the left).

I have planned to make two flavours on that car, the first one that you now see is a modern drift version, whereas a classic Rally version is on the works. Inspiration for the drifting version comes from Colin McRae’s (RIP) mkII and the fabulous mkII owned and raced by Nikos Politis that I have photographed on a local Rally race two years ago (seen on the right).

The whole illustration lasted around 12 hours from sketch to finish and about 18-20 preliminary sketches were drawn in order to establish the best action “posture” for the car. “Inking” and coloring was fully done in Photoshop.

Long live the mkIIs!

K.I.T.T. comes back in a Ford Mustang body!

It’s probably no news to many of you but I’ve just found out about the remake, or should I say- brand new episodes of Knight Rider. I was very glad to see that the new version of K.I.T.T. will be a mighty Shelby Mustang GT500 KR! Wooeeeyyy!

There’s a lot of debate going around as to which model is the perfect candidate for the role of KITT, I even seen somewhere the Mercedes McLaren SLR being proposed, but I reckon that choosing the ’stang, was a good choice. First of all the car should be an American icon, as the first KITT was. But TransAm is not in production anymore, the new Dodge Challenger is not yet in the streets, the new Camaro won’t see production until 2009,

Peugeot design contest 2008

I’ve just received a newsletter in my inbox announcing the Peugeot Design Contest 2008.

It is the 5th edition of the, now annual, contest sponsored exclusively by Peugeot, giving chances to talented (and not talented) designers all over the world to basically show what they’ve got and apart from the cash prizes there’s some chance that one can get a position in some automotive design studio, which is far better than any cash prize…. well not any really

This year’s contest briefs us to “IMAGINE THE PEUGEOT IN THE WORLDWIDE MEGALOPOLIS OF TOMORROW”.

And the candidates should design with the following four aspects in mind: environmental awareness (therefore V10 and V12 gasoline drenching supercars are an instant failure ), social harmony, interactive mobility and economic efficiency. Also one must keep Peugeot branding cues and styling in mind.

The deadline for this one is the 20th of July 2008, so get sketching and/or modeling ASAP!

Good luck!

The contest’s official site is here

Obsessed with Car-Toons!

It appears that I’m heading full speed ahead to be obsessed with Car-Toons, or Chibi-Cars, or whatever you want to call them really! They are cute and real fun to look at!

For some years (…or decades?) I’ve been seeing these cute sketches cropping around and they always get my attention. In fact I could spend more time observing a good car-toon than a good normal car rendering! And I always wanted to do a car-toon sketch! Also recently I’ve watched “Cars”, the movie from Pixar and falled in love with it! It all happened really 3-4 weeks ago when I first saw Brian Knowlton’s (also known as R0tti on deviantart.com) fabulous line-art sketch of a Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder! I was hooked! Brian had put so much character and personality in to the car that it could almost speak back to you! Not to mention that it was so sweet to look at!