Mort's Custom Corner - EVOlving your design skills

• 2010-01-15
• NFSKirk
• 11 Comments

 Earlier this week, William went over some of the common mistakes made by vinyl designers, and after that, we moved on to designing your first basic vinyl. Continuing in the evolution of Mort's Custom Corner, today we're going to tackle evolving your personal designs, and what better car to use than the Mitsubishi EVO to illustrate the point. I picked up the EVO because it has many lines, and that will make my explanations a bit easier to understand.But if you wish you can try my advice on any other car model, it should work quite fine too. First, we apply a totally white paint (gloss) to the car.Here are some 'before' pictures of this car:   In the next photos, William has shaded some areas (in pink) that are best suited for placement of vinyl.   Following these lines makes it easier to create a more attractive design.And it helps too if you want to keep a feeling of symmetry on both side of your car.Now with experience, I dropped the trick I gave you on my first interview and instead I work with the lines of car. But when it comes to symmetry, just use the technique you find easiest. Before we continue, I'd like to introduce you to my best friends in design: The Primitives - otherwise known as the circle, square and gradient.   Hopefully, The Primitives will become good friends of yours too, and like any good friend of design, they can scale, rotate and skew to find a design you're happy with.  If something more complicated is your speed, these shapes can combine to make something that at first looks difficult much easier.   In an effort to make things simpler today, we're just going to work with white and black gloss vinyls and William's three best friends. When you follow the lines William shaded in earlier and fill them in with vinyl, you may get a result like this:        With this design, as mentioned earlier, William followed all of the available lines on the vehicle, but if you're just starting out, you may want to take a relaxed approach and only follow a few as you get the hang of design. William also has his own thread on the Need for Speed forums, click here to take a look at some more of his designs. He offers tips in the thread and invites everyone in the NFS community to post their own cars there, too. Next time, William is going to move into more complicated designs, so be sure to look for that in the coming days. He wanted to close with the quote: "We all learn from our mistakes, so even if you don't achieve what you expected, work hard, keep trying and you'll get your money back later."