Once more unto the paintshop (updated)

Forza 3's immense shininess has tempted me back into the 'paintshop' area, where I ended up spending most of my time in Forza 2 (instead of, you know, actually racing cars).

I've decided to get to work on something I always intended to do in Forza 2 but never found the time, inspired by the awesome artwork on Ed McGuinness. This is a multi-image project that should end up with at least three related livery designs, so it should keep me busy for a while.

As it's been a while since I did anything like this, I thought I'd catalogue the process. I have no idea if it'll be of any interest to anyone, but if nothing else, it might help me keep everything straight and maybe spot where I could do something better or more efficiently.

(You can't take photos in the vinyl editor in Forza 3. As I haven't decided what cars I'm going to use for the finished designs yet, I'm just slapping things onto the side of a Lexus that I've painted white in order to take these shots.)

Having picked the image I want to start with, the first step is to roughly block out the overall shape of the image. I tend to use a pale colour that won't be used in the finished design, to make it easy to remove later on. The lines are to help me when resizing parts of the image in the editor:

Once that's complete, it's time to start working on the outline of the image proper. In the past I've found it easier to complete the outline of the whole image before going to work on filling it in, but as it's been a while and this is a (re)learning experience, I've decided to spend a little time focussing on the fist which forms the single largest part of the figure. Here's the finished outline:

The next step is to copy the previous layers, recolour them to something flesh-like, then shift and shrink them to create the outline of the fist. Then I can just fill in the rest with a few more shapes before working on the detail:

First version of the detail work on the fist:

Final (well, at least for now) version of the fist, with some simple shading and some of the smaller lines removed for neatness:

More pics will follow as the rest of the figure takes shape...