Ray’s all carbon Datsun 510 hood is a work of art by itself.  It is feather light, strong, and only a handful of them exist in the world… Let alone here in the US.

When I got started on this hood, I was a bit worried with the quality of image I was going to be able to deliver.  A lot of the images of “The Great Wave” were of average quality, or had poor color reproduction.  I was able to find two seperate images.  One that was of great image quality that I could use, and another that had vibrant coloring…  closer to what the print may have first looked like when it was freshly done in 1832.

I took the high quality image and did some color adjustments in Photoshop to get it closer to the vibrant recreation I had found.  I then vectorized the image, and spent a long time cleaning up the shapes, lines, and curves of the artwork.  Once I had vectorized artwork, I was able to sample colors from the more vibrant image, kind of like a complex paint by numbers.

After measuring the hood, I sized the graphics to fit, and sent it to production.  Printed on 3m IJ180C, with a 3m Lustre overlaminate, and contour cut to shape.

The application may have been the easiest part of the process.  As the hood is mostly flat, it required little use of heat to conform to the shape.  Only a bit was used on the front leading edge.

Ray is still working on completing the 510 this is slated to go on, but joked in the mean time he will be hanging the hood on his wall above his bed as artwork.

Projects

My good friend Armin @ World One Performance contacted me about putting graphics on the new shop car, a Lightning Red ‘08 STI.

World One already had a great logo, but we were unsure as to how to incorporate it onto the side of the new car.  I started with proofing the standard logo at an angle down the side of the car, trying various sizes, colors, and rotations.  It just wasn’t flowing as well as we had hoped.

The next step, was to try and come up with a design other than the logo to put on the side of the car to attract attention.  I toyed around with stripes and swooshes, but they just didn’t hit the spot.  I decided to go back to trying to make the logo work on the car… and then it hit me.

World One’s Logo already had a perfect design element… the turbo!  Like all good designs, once it had direction, it practically put itself together.

I cut all the graphics in Avery’s Gunmetal Metallic vinyl, it was almost a perfect color match to the Seibon Edition Volk wheels on the car.

Install was straight forward, with only some creative thinking needed for the large turbo graphic over the rear wheel wells.

Projects

The Drift Yaris was a very quickly done project.  In the span of a couple of days, the graphics were designed, cut, and then flown to Vegas where they were installed just prior to SEMA.

Dave Fotheringham was able to provide me with a good basis of the design he wanted right off the bat.  Without his beginning vision, there was no chance the graphics would be done by SEMA.  A couple tweaks, a whole bunch of scaling and trapping, and the graphics were ready to be cut.

The graphics helped the car really fulfill its race car image.  The simple color scheme helped attract attention, but not hide or overpower the immense amount of outstanding fabrication work on the car.

Projects

This project was all about being different.

Its not often you see a EDM car sporting JDM suspension parts, wheels, or even hoods.   Even more so, you rarely see cars with anime girls adorning their sides or hoods.

Given the offbeat nature of this project, the design phase was a bit lengthier than normal.  It really came down to finding the right characters to fit the car.

All characters were sampled from high resolution desktop wallpapers.  They were then cleaned up in photoshop to remove a lot of the digital artifacts.   I then scaled them to full size, and masked the images appropriately.

The anime characters were printed using a HP9000s Solvent Inkjet printer and Flexi Design & Rip software by www.speedysigncenter.com

Projects