Hello, my name is Daniel Iulian Vijoi and I'm lead artist at AMC Studio, a Romanian game development company based in Bucharest.

This illustration was made for fun, the purpose was to try something different from what I usually do – game art. I wanted to picture here something that is more of a lifestyle than a few objects gathered around; there's something about the pleasure of driving and loving everything about cars. I took my inspiration from American hotrods and brought in iconic items to get a better feeling about the scene. Those guys are living there, everything they do is about cars, driving and roads; that "thing” is their home. They have everything they need in that wheel house: fuel, gas, water, satellite television, cinema and even a generator under the carriage. This could be something between cartoony and real, something you can picture it in a movie like Pixar's Cars or in a similar environment.

Here are some images I gathered for inspiration from the Internet (Fig.01). From these references I started with a quick, simple sketch, just to put all the elements on paper, later starting to detail each one of them (Fig.02). Based on the sketch, I started adding base colours, shading and detailing some areas (Fig.03).





Here I've detailed how I painted the leather area on the base drawing using the Smudge tool in Photoshop (Fig.04). I put the smudged layer, set to Multiply, over the coloured area. This was how I started out with most of the details. Here is a step by step similar process, starting with some very simple lines and working towards a very nice fabric (Fig.05). It is very helpful to study at home, or on the Internet, to see how different materials look when exposed to light. You can achieve this result with the Blur tool as well, but you have much more control over the shading with the Smudge tool.