New painter here, and like the title says, I need some help with a project I’m undertaking…hopefully this is an appropriate place to ask for this.
What I’m doing is trying to recreate a California license plate, circa mid-1980s. What I’m having trouble with is the alternating gold/white bars in the circle emblem at the top of the plate:
Basically what I’ve got now is just the gold circle with three gold bars across it, but I’m not sure how to reverse the colors where they cross the circle. The issue, as I see it, is maintaining the rounded edges of the bars at the edge of the circle, otherwise just overlaying a bar of the opposite color (gold/white, white/gold) would do the job, and I have no idea what sort of vinyl shape to use to do so.
So, input and suggestions, please! And thank you all in advance.
You could use the half circle shape and just offset it alittle for each color. Just alternate colors and slide down alittle each time. You will have to resize each one to keep desired shape but easy enough. Hope this helps. Maybe someone could explain it a little better.
Thanks for the reply, Cheddarbob. If I follow what you’re saying correctly, you’re suggesting more or less stacking progressively smaller half circles on top of each other and alternating the colors, right? I didn’t think of that, and that might have been easier than what I actually ended up doing.
What I ended up doing was laying a smaller bar across the circle in the alternate color, and then just resizing and spinning & skewing the half circle shape and applying it to the end, matching it up to the curve of the circle as best as possible. It dawned on me that, even though I’d started with a rather large vinyl, it would be scaled down quite a lot when applied to the rear of a car…it’s only a license plate, after all, and they’re just 12"x6"…so any tiny goofs on the curves on those line edges wouldn’t even be visible once it’s placed on a car.
Thanks again for the suggestion. I’ll file that away for future use!
I have made this plate myself. What I did is use a half circle for the white and then a two squares shrunk to rectangles and then skewed at the correct angles to give the appearance that they are curved for the gold and it works fine. The way you have done it is fine too. The more you paint the more you learn how to use each shape. It’s amazing what shapes you can make by skewing other shapes.
Guys, seriously, this isn’t that hard! If you’re gonna help the new guy, actually help him!
White Background
Gold Circle [when sizing select the whole layer to keep perfect 1:1 ratio with the sides]
White Half-Circle [when sizing, select the whole layer to keep perfect 1:1 ratio, fit to exactly lower half of circle above]
1 -Copy/Paste Yellow Half Circle, change color to gold. Select whole layer and size down, move down to bottom of white half-circle, unselect the layer and adjust the X-size to fit.
2 -Copy/Paste White Half Circle, change color to white. Select whole layer and size down, move down to bottom of gold half-circle, unselect the layer and adjust the X-size to fit.
-repeat steps 1,2 once more
Group all of the above.
3 Yellow Rectangles, Y-sized to fit in each white space
Cut ‘Gold Circle Group’
Paste ‘Gold Circle Group’ over the yellow bars.
Create ‘California’ font.
Total number of layers = 10 plus Font and white fade at the top.
I’m not expert but I just knocked this out in 5 minutes and probably used fewer layers…
Remember that when you’re painting, a lot of the more complicated designs are going to use “negative space”, cutting a shape by masking it with another, or masking a shape with the background color. It’s a rare design indeed that doesn’t actually just start the paint by layering a huge colored “backdrop” square over every surface of the car (because masking a vinyl directly onto the paint leaves a faint outline).
You want to keep your layer count to a bare minimum, especially if you plan on sharing this license plate as a vinyl group. Nobody wants to download a simple license plate only to find that it blows out half of their layer limit just to make the “sunrise” or whatever. If you use fewer layers for each element, you can cram more into your designs!
I’ll agree that maybe I was patronizing them a bit, it just seemed like an easy answer to me, and the first responses seemed to miss it:
Cheddar had the right idea, but admitted that it could probably be explained better.
You and the OP both used a harder method that was either using more layers (in the case of the op) and/or wasn’t going to make for a smooth, rounded edge (your skewed rectangles method). The method that I posted would be 9 layers (gold circle, white half circle, gold half, white half, gold half, white half + 3 background bars) but makes for a smoother transition.
Either way you do it works, because at the end of the day it’s just a license plate and the errors will shrink into the picture. I was just pointing out that if you needed to do something like this on a larger scale, the half-circle method is definitely the ticket.
Thanks to all who replied with ideas…frankly, that’s what it’s all about; learning new and different ways to do things.
As I said above, I got the job done well enough for the purpose at hand, and like SlyBlu7 noted, once a plate is scaled down, you really can’t see any minor edge issues like that. I posted the finished plate on the storefront, and so far 4 or 5 people have downloaded it, so I guess I did a passable job.
Moving on, who are the guy(s) to talk to about really nice, realistic looking flames? I’ve watched a couple videos and tutorials on YouTube, etc., but none of them really seem to be what I want. Specifically, I’m looking for a black-to-white or white-to-black / gray-scale type flame for my silver-gray Nissan GT-R Spec V.
For any flames, you’re going to lay down your regular old Flame vinyls in whatever shape you want. Put a square on the front bumper for the color you want the fade to start at (for you, white) The fades are going to be done with the fade out circles (Gradient #28). You can see him doing this in the video, just laying in the circles to blend everything. He starts with white (the start of the fade) and then groups all of the white circles together, copies them, pastes them underneath the white layer, and changes them to yellow. Then bumps them higher up the flame. This gets the fade in the front set up.
edit:
This guy has some seriously good flames on his cars in his own thread, no less! http://forums.forza.net/turn10_postsm35110_New-Flame-Design-Chapeltiger6945.aspx
an image I’ll borrow from him:
These flames are done with a mix of colors, and then altering the transparency. You can see the stock flame vinyls mixed and skewed in there, overlapping each other. He started at the back with the dark brownish/red and a decent transparency. Then he moved from that dark red up through yellow, and probably never actually increased the transparency at all - just changed the size, placement, and color.
These flames (painter unknown) were done with the faded method shown in the tutorial. He started with the red flames, and then applied yellow fade circles, then white fade circles. The blue outlining could be one of two things: either copies of the red flames moved and/or resized to fit beneath them, or they used the “parenthesis” type curve in the Community Shapes sections to outline them by hand. Most likely the former.
This last method looks more striking, but is no different than the method above. Rather than fade the flames to white however, he chose to fade them back to the base color (black). However, to heighten the effect, he has gone through with the same fade-circles in white, lighter green, and the base color, and selectively picked out parts of the flames to shade and highlight. It’s not hard to do, but it takes a bit more of an artist’s eye. Done well, they can look really, really good. Understand though that you can’t use the “special colors” as a base color if you do this, so if your car is actually a mettalic silver, back-fading like this won’t work.
The penultimate option, and the one you might need to take if you want some really wild custom flaming, especially on a non-standard color. This was done with a fade-circle for the red “glow”, and then he used an assortment of other shapes and the fade-circles to create the twisting flames by hand. I can’t spot any of the standard flames anywhere in this, but they might be hiding in there somewhere. Either way, this is a very intensive and time-consuming option, but it will be more appreciated by veteran painters because it doesn’t just rely on stock graphics to get the effect. Of course, I don’t know how many people an pull something like this off, so yeah… there’s a reason it’s awesome I guess.
Thanks for replying again, SkyBlu. Yes, I’ve watched SEVERAL videos in that series, but frankly, Lemondrop14e kinda bugs me…I have a hard time following his proceedures, probably because he tends to race through steps very fast while often referring to things he’s said and done in previous videos.
I’ll sit down and watch this one again a few times and see what sticks.
Edited my post - that second method wont work on flames. You can fade almost anything else, but the curves in the flames won’t let you keep scaling down and moving back because you’re going to pull the tips closer together and go off the layer above. Nothing to really worry about other than saying that no, that’s not going to work.
Your only option is to either apply a reversed fade like I said - fading the flames into the base color of the car at one end or the other, or getting really super intricate and creating your own flames and fading within those.
The Hudson with the “hot rod flames” is very similar to what Lemondrop14e shows in his vids, and is really not what I’m looking for. It’s a bit too basic.
The Boss 429 LOOKS great, but it’s not the effect I want…it’s too busy and frankly doesn’t look enough like actual flames to me.
The flames on the Viper you linked, though, are pretty much what I’ve got in mind for my GT-R, except for the colors.
Maybe I’ll drop ChapelTiger6945 a message and see if he’d be willing to do a commission for me.
Thanks again, Skyblu!
