Staring at the blank canvas of my newly downloaded and unpainted 1970 Dodge Challenger, I knew immediately which car I would paint for my next project. All I needed was a theme that would fit the style of the car, so once again I turned to my DVD collection for inspiration. It would have to be a car movie, it would have to have style, and - most importantly - it would have to have some kick ass cover art. It would have to be Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof.”
Using the movie poster for reference, I would recreate the imagery and restyle the layout to fit the body of the car while maintaining the style and spirit of the original work. I knew that in order to pull this off I would need to take a different approach, so to achieve this I used a grid technique which made the process much faster, easier, and more accurate. To get all the little details I created each element of the design separately on the roof of a mini cooper – the largest flat space available – and then transferred and resized the designs once they were complete.
To make sure the grid technique would work for me I wanted to try something simple, so I created the title font logo using a grid reference. Using the grid took some getting used to, but after completing the title font I decided to go ahead and use the same technique to create the image of the eight women on the side of the car. Once that was finished, I used the same method to create the image of the car from the poster art on the hood of the Challenger.
A few hours and 930 layers later, the car was complete and ready to terrorize the tracks. The “Death Proof” Challenger has since gone on to become my personal favorite and my most popular design, which I still get requests for to this day.
