The Frantic Ford Mustang Funny Car of Jim Fox and Ronnie Rivero came on strong when it was built, with the series being continued on the circuit for a few years. It has recently been recreated and now runs as a display nostalgia funny car on the East Coast. This illustration became the first piece that I was do to for Car Craft, but I felt I could do much better than I was doing with the Charlie Allen piece, so I asked if I could get a couple of Swajas pieces to study. They gave me two of them, including the original of the first cutaway that I tried to copy in order to figure out what they were doing on the drawings. After taking them home and looking closely at them, I almost quit doing them, as I figured that I could never match Swajas linework ... still dont think I ever approached that to this day. I decided that I needed to change format completely, so I did a review of what I was doing and changed a few things, including switching from vellum to mylar film; it is much smoother but is also much more fragile for lines, since I still use normal pencil lead instead of mylar lead. I tried a few things on this piece and was pretty happy with it when I took it down to Petersen a couple of weeks later, only to find that the project was off as the boys headed back to the East Coast the Monday after I shot my photos at Lions, so the magazine never ran the feature. As an aside, I had the thing with me at Orange County and finally had the nerve to go talk with Steve Swaja. I told him that I was trying to get myself going with cutaways and asked if he would take a look at this and give me some tips. His first comment was on some horrible stippling that I tried on the front tire as shading. Because I was stubbornly using pencil, a true stipple was not possible as you cannot really get a dot with a pencil as you can with a Rapidograph ... looked more like the tire needed a shave than anything else. He then told me to make it easy on myself and to use pencil instead of ink ... and I told him it was pencil. He studied the piece under that tower light at the County and started asking me questions about how I got pencil to look like that ... stunned me to actually be telling him my technique as my intent was to be getting information like that from him.
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 20:48:35 +0000
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