Las Vegas Car Stars

So after the successful reaction to my logo design work for Knight Rider Festival and Knight Rider Festival II, my good friend Paul challenged me to come up with a logo for his TV/Film car show called "Car Stars" in Las Vegas.

He wanted to show off recognizable cars that will be at the event but also do something that felt like a mixture between Hollywood, Las Vegas, and cars.

I really had to pull out my full bag of tricks to conquer this monumental challenge. It's hard enough rendering one car but having to do FOUR, yikes!

If you look closely you will see that nothing in this logo is a photo. Although I did start with photo references, I tweeked, filled, and altered things until I had my own vector car art. I didn't want an airbrushed look so I avoided as many gradiants and feathers as possible.

I did completely create the General Lee entirely into fills which took entirely too long so I used some other tricks on the cars in the front to speed things up a bit.

Still filters and layer styles didn't give me the look I wanted so I had to keep tweeking things until the cars started getting the look I was going for.

The only gradiants I used were on the chrome bits on Herbie. I also detailed the hell out of the 70s Batmobile, even going as far as to put in the black metal grill work and police light.

The "Car Stars" letters themselves took me about 5 hours of smearing and blurring and all kinds of other things that involved more work that clicking a few layer styles and filters. I really wanted a clean, slick, smooth classic car lettering feel but I added my own touch of originality by having the S curve around into the T and some other little subtle bits.

I was originally influenced by Disney's "Cars" logo as a starting point but things just kind of go off in their own direction and I just go with the flow.

I don't have Maya installed on my desktop yet so I'm left with having to do 3D effects the old fashioned way -drawing it digitally by hand.

I wanted the Las Vegas letters to be white hot - I think desert, heart, and excitement when I picture Vegas so I wanted to really emphasis the energy of it.

Since the cars are the "stars" I gave them the same kind of vibrant energy.

This marks the first time I really looked around the web to expand my understanding of layer styles in Photoshop. I played with gradiant overlays, inner shadow/glows, and stroke effects this time around to really get a slick molten metal look without destroying my original text.

I didn't want the star to just be a plain fill or some crappy filter effect so I tried to emulate metallic fleck car paint using noise, lighting effects, and dodge/burn.

Another challenge was making sure this logo works against black and white backgrounds.

You're looking at about a week of sleepless, frustrating, hair pulling nights of back breaking and wrist aching work.

Still they say no pain, no gain and for me this project has allowed me to pull myself out of a pretty severe artist block.

Ok I'm exhausted now.

If you like this deviation and fav it, please be kind enough to leave a comment will ya? Makes us artists feel appreciated!

Las Vegas Car Stars takes place October 23-24th on Fremont Street in Las Vegas, NV. I will be there on hand as a VIP signing/selling my Knight Rider Companion book at the event.

This logo is property of NRN DESIGN and may not be used without permission. Copyright 2009 all rights reserved.

Enjoy!

-Nick
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