How to make a car illustration (step-by-step)

psddude Tutorials Drawing 2794 May 14th, 2019

Car illustration Photoshop tutorial - in this tutorial I will show you how to make illustrations in Photoshop using a car vector silhouette and appling color to it. Follow this tutorial and you will create a very cool vintage car illustration that you can print as a poster.

In the tutorial I will use the PNG car shapes from a free package, but you can also use the vector car silhouettes. This will allow you to make the car illustration as big as you want without loosing any detail when printing at 300dpi.

Let's make a car illustration in Photoshop. Just follow this tutorial and you will get this beautiful result in less than 10 minutes.

When making layout designs like posters, it is better to use a grid. Press Control+' to show grid. Use a Photoshop Grid to align your design elements.

Create a Background Layer

Create a new layer and fill it with color white. Call this layer Background.

Car Silhouette (Brushes, Shapes & PNG)

Add one of these free Car Silhouette PNG images in a new layer. Go to File > Place and choose a car silhouette. I used the "car-silhouette-2.png" from this pack.

This pack also contains car brushes, car shapes and car PNG images.

Press Shift-Control-Alt-E to merge the two layers.

Pick the Magic Wand Tool and check Contiguous. Then click on the white background (top left corner) to make a selection.

Press Shift-Control-I to invert the selection.

Press Control-J to make a copy and call it Car Shape. Move this layer below the Car PNG 2 layer.

Delete the Merged Layers layer.

Illustration Coloring in Photoshop

Learn how to color a scanned drawing in Photoshop or how to color lineart in Photoshop in just a few steps.

So, we now have three layers: the background, the car shape and the car silhouette. First add a Color Overlay to the background layer using any color you like. I used the color #ffaf32 for the background.