Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, this tutorial is being writing while painting a car in Paint Shop Pro 6 by Jasc. If you don't have it you can download an evaluation version which you can use for 60 days, but then you will have to either uninstall it or purchase it.

The first part of this tutorial is dedicated to the tools you will use. It is important to be farmiliar with them, and understand the qualities of each if you are to obtain the best result. When making a car there is no need to use many of the features, although there are about 5 that are quite important.

	Selection: This tool enables large sections or the drawing to be highlighted for copying, cutting and pasting requirements. It can also be used to move sections of the drawing into other areas. Most people tend to use it to highlight an entire area, but by holding down shift wile selecting an area you can add to the selection, and therefore more intricate areas can be selected. Always useful for moving sponsors. Another use is to highlight an undesired section and press 'delete' to remove it.
	Paint Brush: This tool will become your best friend. Set the size of the brush to 1 in the 'Tool Options' and away you go. It's good for detail work such as shading and touching up sponsors, although it futile for larger areas such as the section on top of the side pods.
	Dropper: Another tool to become familiar with. By using this you can click on any pixel on the model and automatically start using that color. It is excellent when shading, when selecting colors previously used. Because you can use about 10 different shades of a color it is important to have the right one. So click on a previously painted area and away you go. Also, if you are unsure of what shade you have selected, click on a previously colored pixel and then click on the palette. The color currently selected has a box around it. Obviously a left click on a model changes the painting color, and a right click changes the underlying color.
	Flood Fill: This tool is best used in the early stages when clearing entire areas ready for painting. The sidepods and airbox are excellent areas where this can be used. Use it in conjunction with the dropper and paint brush and it achieves fast results.
	Palette: A painters best friend. With this you can select any color with which to paint. The color selected is shown in the small box down the bottom (a darkish blue in this case), and the under color is shown in a square box underneath that (white). These can be swapped around by clicking on the double ended arrow in the bottom left hand corner. To change color exactly click on the selected color to bring a window up listing all 256 colors. To get a less exact color simply click on the mess of colors in the larger box above.
	Magic Wand: Useful for selecting regions of one color with a single click. The tolerance can be set in the 'Tool Options', although rarely needs to be changed. Has its applications, although there is little this tool can do that the Selection tool can't. It's real use is only to select large areas of one color in a single click.
	Zoom: This tool is excellent for getting in close to see exactly what you're doing. For example, if you're making a sponsors logo, it is important to get the shading on it correct. Therefore you zoom in to paint, and zoom back out to see the changes and how they have effected the sponsor. Also, it helps when you are painting just a single line of pixels, and a Flood Fill can't be used.
	Undo: What good is a pencil without an eraser? If you make a mistake simply hit this button, or you could press ctrl + z. Either way they both remove the last action done. Alternatively, to the right of this button is the same icon simply mirrored. This is the redo button, in case you undo something and then change you're mind.

So those are the tools you will need to know. Next up, is making the car itself.

I like to look for a car with some qualities that I like, for example the air intakes in the sidepods or detail on the airbox or nosecone. A little detail goes a long way to making a good car look great - just look at the extra effort Driver X puts into his cars and then look at the result!

Based on a real F1 car, but has been doctored slightly. Just by looking at it I have decided that I will paint the sidepods blue, the same shade as the rest of the car. The airbox will remain white, and perhaps a little bit of detail on the top of the sidepods couldn't hurt. Notice the cockpit is well colored, that will stay the same, and also the sidepods air intake is quite good, just needs a little bit of work. As for the sponsors - gone! Take them all out and add them again later.

So there is is. A lot of difference. Notice all I have done is remove the sponsors and colored in the major areas where I wantd color. Looking at it, the blue needs to be a little bit darker, and I think the front spoiler would be much better suited if that was blue. Also not that I forgot a little section on the airbox, and have also left the Bridgestone sponsors on the rear wing supports. I left those sponsors because I don't need to touch that section of the car, and they are easy enough to get rid of later. Now what I will do is clean up the sidepod air intakes and also color the front spoiler. I will darker the blue and also clear that bit I forgot before.

Here are the sidepods. On the left is the one I have edited, on the right is the original. I decided not to darker the blue, as the current color was the 3rd darkest as it was. That would mean that basically no shading can be done, so I decided to stick with the blue as it was. You'll notice that for most of the white and grey areas I have gone 1 shade of blue darker, and then when it begins to get blacker still I went for the darkest shade of blue. Also, inside the actual black area there were little bits of a lighter grey color. This was very visible, so I darkened this up a bit and made it fit with the rest of the car. Now to get bot sidepods together I will copy the left one, paste is and then flip it over in the Image -> Mirror command.

So here is the basic colors of the car. Next we want to add some deatil to the front spoiler and the rear of the sidepods. The spoiler is easy, just a couple of lines, on like of the darkest shade of blue, the next of just straight out black, and then the last line of second darkest shade of blue.

Here's the spoiler after I painted it. From the left it goes; darkest shade of blue, black, second darkest blue. Once I'd done that I noticed that it wasn't all that defined. So I did a Flood Fill on the top (or right hand side in the picture) of the spoiler in a slightly lighter blue. Nothing that was really obvious, just something that I could do a bit more shading with. It is about 3 shades different. I then went back and added another line to the shading, a slightly lighter blue to the second darkest to give a rounded apprearance.

With the sidepods I'm going to cheat a little. I can't be bothered drawing my own, so I will have a look and seee if any of the cars that I have on my computer have the section I am after in a design that I like. I can then copy and paste it into the drawing and then recolor it to match.

This is the section I was after, and I found this on a car I already had. A good thing about it is that there is some engine detail in it and it's also blue. This wasn't the reason I chose it, but these things did come to mind. Now I paste it into our car and tidy it up so it matches our color. The trick is also to do only one side and copy it over. That saves a heap of time in what is already a fairly lengthy process.

There's the edited version. All I have done is clean up the other blue color, and also did a little shading around the edges. Remember that the darker colors always go where the darker part is. So in this case the darkest blue is in by the black, and then that is surrounded by the next darkest blue. This gives an even finish.

So here's out car so far. Basic colors, sidepods clean, nice engine detail, front spoiler. Next up is to see what it looks like in GP2Edit. It's pointless putting sponsors on it if it looks awful in GP2Edit, plus if there are any mismatches in the paint we can fix that here.

The area I was concerned about was the sidepods. They actually came up well, and I'm not going to change them because they look good. One thing I will change though is the rear wing. I don't like the dark blue cross member and the white end plates. So I will make the end plates blue and the cross members white. Also, have a look at the front wing. Notice the white area on it. This is saying that the white section which I have left on the spioler for the nose is a little too wide, so I'll have to go back and fix it up.

I went back to the drawing and brang that section of the front wing in each side by 1 pixel. By going back to GP2Edit to check it has come up good, so I can leave that now.

Next up is some shading along the front nose cone. The trick here is to get some good definition, but not have it too dark - which is easy to do

Now that we have done that to the nosecone, we have to shade a little section of the side of the car. This is where the nosecone and the side of the car mate up, so to keep it looking all nice a little shading has to be done.

Here is the area I have shaded. The same way as the way I did it above, but I also wrapped around the bottom of the nose. I have colored the part I didn't shade in orange so you can see it more clearly. Don't foget to copy this and mirror it onto the otherside. Now we've got to try that out in GP2Edit.

Not too bad. It adds a good bit of detail, and makes the car look much better. Notice though that there is a white square in the middle of all the shading. That will be the section where the number is supposed to go. I find this is easier to do by making some markings so you know exactly where it is.

I worked out exactly where the number parts came into it, and have thus copied the scetion of the nose over them so it all works. The way I did that was to color in the number areas in a very different color (I used orange again), and then drew lines on the nose in green. By process of trial and error I eventually worked out exactly where the lines should be and thus colored a yellow section around it so I would know exactly where it was and what sections needed to be copied. Remember there are 2 bits on the nosecone for the numbers, on the bottom left and right of the drawing. Make sure you copy it over both, because otheriwise one car will look great, and the other has big blotches everywhere.

Now it's time to whack some sponors onto it. I have a few bitmaps that are just all sponsors, I have included them in this download. So now I will have a look through and see what I want. Remember that the sponsors don't have to match color wise, but it saves time if they do. If you don't find anything on them, have a look on other cars, you may just find something you're after.

The sponsor sheets had nothing I was really interested in, so I looked through the cars I had and found this one.Overall there is nothing particularly brilliant about it, but it does have some nicely made sponsor logos. I have decided to take the Aston Martin logo aff the side, and stick that onto our car.

There we go. Easy! Notice I have also placed the Aston Martin logo on the very end of the nose cone. I copied the one off the airbox, because that was surrounded by white and would be easy to paste there by just rotating it by 90 degrees. I had to touch up 2 pixels which looked out of place in the shading, but otherwise it was a straight copy paste for the logo. The actual text Aston Martin were just copy and paste. So now we have an engine supplier, we need some oil! Basically we can choose anyone, but I think Castrol, Mobil or Elf will work best.

I decided upon Mobil, but the only logos I could find were either the wrong color or too big. So I am going to edit one from sponsor5.bmp from black to blue. Basically all I need to do is change the black bits to dark blue and the grey bits to a lighter blue.

The top logo is the original one I started with, and the bottom the edited version. Notice all I have done is repaint over the top of what was already there with a suitable blue. Work with one color at a time, and jump 2 or 3 shades for each different shade you need. It doesn't have to be perfect, but as long as you can read it pretty well, although in some cases you don't even need to be able to do that.

Here is what the same logo's look like a 1:1 scale.

By no means a perfect conversion, but you can still tell exactly what it is. I can now copy this and paste it in a couple of places all over the car.

Not too bad. I like symmetry, although it is completely up to you in the way you lay your cars out. Next we need to fill in the gaps, namely in the airbox and on the sidepods. Of course not forgetting the nose as well.

Danka fills up the airbox nicely, but we're still left with the sidepods and the nose to do. I think rather than copying and pasting I might make my own. On the sidepods I will write 'white', basically a rip off of the 2000 Arrows that has 'orange' written on it. Then we can do a bit of work on the numbers.

First I work on the general shape, which in this case is simple lettering. Once this is done you can get started on shading to make it look much better. What I did was to open a new drawing and actually type in 'white'. I then copied this over onto the sidepod where I can edit it. You'll notice that after you use the text tool you can't use anything else, so you copy in and out of different drawings so you don't have to open and close the same one all the time.

Here is the end result. While it doesn't look brilliant from up close from 1:1 scale it's quite alright. Notice how I have shaded even parts which didn't need it. This is because leaving them plain white makes them look out of place compared with the rest of the design. The trick is really to get it looking right from 1:1, it doesn't matter what it looks like close up. Have a look at the 'w', all it is is scale after scale of different colors, which looks poorly done, but when viewed from 1:1 it doesn't look too bad at all. So I made this, and copied it over onto the other sidepod, next all that is left is working on the nose and numbers.

So there she is so far, nearly there, but still with a little work to do. To get to this stage I have taken about 5 hours, but that is because I am also having to write what I have been doing, and look for examples. Generally you can do this in about an hour to an hour and a half.

Now I have added another sponsor down the nose, and also tidied a few other things up such as the very rear of the car (top right hand corner) and fixed the rear spoiler like I said I would.

Once again I cheated. I opened a new drawing and used the text tool to get the basic shape of the numbers. I used 26 adn 27 for a couple of reasons. Mostly because the number is not currently in the GP2World Championship League (free plug; http://www.gp2world.com) and also because the number 2 can be quite tricky. I copied the numbers into the car, 26 in the bottom right hand corner and 27 in the bottom left. Remember to rotate them 90 degrees so they are the right way up on the car. Then started the task of shading. These are far easier because they are either single or double pixel items, which means shading is higly restricted and therefore much much easier. Basically you make the ends are corners a lighter color and then gradually build up the color to a darker blue that way. Below is an example of the style I used to give the numbers some detail as apposed to the basic shape they already had.

The above is a copy of what the number looks like on the car. The left is the edited version, the right is the non-edited version. The edited version has been made using the style of shading shown above, which is basically forming a diamond around each pixel of the previous color.

Exactly the same image as is above, only enlarge. Here you can clearly see the shading, and also the added squares which weren't on the original to give certain sections a little more thickness. There is a slight exception in both the 2 and 7. I was changing the shade by 4 or 5 tones each time I needed to change color, but is one instance on both numbers the tone has only been changed by 1 or 2. This is because otherwise the number was too dark in that region and looked unbalanced and wierd.

For the rear spoiler end plates I coped the number I had already made onto them and simply edited them so that the shading went from white to blue and not from blue to white. Easy enough, simply substituting dark blue where there is white and then a couple of shades lighter as you go down.

That's it so far. Personally I think it's just about done, just add a little detail to the rear spoiler like we did to the first, and it's finished. I will also add the Danka sponsor to the rear spoiler too. The trick is to put Danka on the rear spoiler, then do your detail work. That way you can work straight over the sponsor and not have to do more work than required.

There is the Danka on the raer spoiler. What I did was copy Danka from the airbox onto one of the rear spoiler sections, and then put 3 lines through the white section of the spoiler as I did on the front spoiler. I didn't touch the Danka sponsor though, even if the lines would have gone through it. I then went back over the Danka part with the dropper and re-colored the sections which were in line with the darkest one of the lines I put in, and darkened them up a bit to make it look more realistic.

Just one more thing to do. I just noticed that there was nothing on the front spoiler, which would mae the car look very bland with a pretty well vacant nose section too. So I've got to find a sponsor to go in there. Most people tend to go for Bridgestone or something here, generally because they fit easily, but we'll see!

A bit of fooling around with the Mobil logo and I managed to get that onto the front spoiler. So that's it! Finished, whack it into a carset and let's take it racing!