Thursday, July 25, 2013

Illustration Restoration - Pep Boys Motor Oil

Hello there.

It is rare that I actually get to illustrate at work, but when I do, I enjoy every moment of it. This one was an interesting on that came along. Pep Boys had purchased an old vintage "lubester"; an oil pump. It was restored and painted red, but it needed a "cool" vintage graphic on the front... that's where yours truly came in.

All I was supplied with was this image:



Okay. Now to get on with the recreation. I set to work in Photoshop, trying to flatten / straighten out the image so that I could get the best straight on view that I could. Next, I dropped the psd into Illustrator and started to re-create the linework. Now, I have to admit I used the blob brush tool and actually re-drew right on top of the image. I am usually complaining about "tracing" artwork, but since I had to re-create this image as historically accurately as possible, I thought tracing would be an acceptable course of action. Once the inking was in place, and set a new layer and went to town on painting using color fills and the bristle brush tool to re-create the old brushwork from the illustration on the can. After a decent amount of hours invested, I had produced this:

(Click to Enlarge)


So there you have it. I know a lot of people would like to see the "process" pictures / screenshots, but I will probably put them up at a later date. I thought this turned out to be a pretty cool piece, and it will definitely be one for the ol' portfolio.



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