Car Clipart Design in Adobe Photoshop

Emre Husman is a Turkish designer who lives in Toronto, Canada. He is one of the main illustrators of Hot Wheels toys at Mattel Inc. In 2004, Emre participated in the Peugeot Design competition and was one of 10 finalists out of 3,800 participating. He also won a prize in the 2000 Trends in Car Design competition. You can see more of this artist's work at the car clipart gallery here.

If you've been wanting to learn how to draw car clipart for a long time, this tutorial is exactly what you need!

To get started, open your sketch in Adobe Photoshop and set the width to 2000 pixels. I usually work in high resolution because it allows me to create high quality clipart.

Open a new layer on your thumbnail and fill it with white. The opacity is about 85%.

Let's start by highlighting the body shape. I always use the Pen tool for this. Select the shape, open a new layer, fill it in with gray. And try to keep the lines for your future work.

Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat Car Clipart

Clipart source here

Select the window shapes, open a new layer and fill them with black.

Do the same for the front radiator grilles.

Draw ellipses for the wheels over the body layer and apply shadows underneath.

Highlight the headlights and the chrome parts (different layers). Fill them with white.

Highlight the main body parts and fill them in dark or light gray, depending on their location.

Draw more body parts in the same gray tones.

Now start using Dodge and Burn! Draw with a 200-300 px airbrush at 20-40% exposure. Darken the bottom parts and lighten the cars top parts. Also select the area of the windows for highlights; open a new layer over the layer with the windows and with a white airbrush paint them a little (but not completely). Darken the headlights.

Find clipart of pretty rims (or draw them yourself). Cut and paste them over the body layer and play with their color and contrast. Highlight the ellipse on the headlight layer and fill it with white. Give it an external glow. Color the windows from the menu Hue/Saturation (press CTRL + U).

Add a plain black background with a white gradient.

Determine where the light will fall from. Create a copy of each of your rims twice, use layers with ellipses under the rims and draw the tires with Dodge and Burn.

Paint the Probox Van clipart body with matte colors (use menu Hue/Saturation).

Add more detail to the bodywork. Now it's time to polish your car. Create a new layer on the body layers; select and paint white with an airbrush. Finish with all the details except the final body color. Merge all the layers: from the lowest layers to the uppermost layers. Leave the shadows and background colors on the different layers.

Duplicate the "merged layers" twice. Paint them using blue and yellow shades (separately). Now, you need to use the airbrush eraser to remove the details with a mix of these colors. Use the Overlay effect (under the menu with the layer effects) for both. Add white dots on the borders for a more realistic glitter effect (on another layer). Finally, add reflections on the car and the background using the layer effects from the menu...