Mercedes Benz 300sl rendering and sketch
Looking back on my archives, I recently realized that most of the car drawings that I do are late-model sport coupes. That discovery wasn’t even all that shocking to me – after all, that’s probably my favorite kind of car of all time. Even when I was 10 years old (way back in the mid 80’s), I was drawing sport coupes!
Well, I decided to shake things up a bit and go old school with this Mercedes Benz 300sl rendering. I don’t think I’ve ever done a true classic like this (other than the ’72 Chevelle drawing I did a couple years ago), so it was interesting to say the least. I had no idea that drawing old cars would be so difficult – there are a lot of compound curves, and there isn’t a straight body panel anywhere to be found on this particular car.
I aslo wasn’t planning on doing a full-blown rendering. My intention was to limit myself to a 1 hour pencil sketch (similar to the Audi R8 sketch I did last week), but I found myself fidgeting with all the little details the further I got into it. I’m glad I decided to go all the way though – I really need to practice my rendering technique anyway, so this added a bit more experience under my belt.
If you’re curious, here is an in-progress sketch of this Mercedes that I captured along the way:
After the line art was complete, I exported everything into Photoshop to add the color and reflections. I must say that Photoshop is difficult to work with in this regard. I think for the next drawing I do, I’ll do as much of the color and shading as I can in SketchBook Pro before exporting to Photoshop.
