Attempting photorealism

Yesterday after a great game of tennis with the men's four from stay active, I came home and decided to embark on something new for me.

I thought I would try to paint a car, giving it a glint of polished smooth curves, in a photorealistic style.

The Porsche 911 has some nice interesting curves so I started with this yesterday, taking my time to draw it out carefully.

This morning I started to add some oil paint, and here it is at the halfway stage with the image of the original car that I was copying on my monitor. You can see the original image has a lot of blue grey tones.

I used just two colours so far, paynes grey and mixing white, and a turps to linseed stand oil mix of about 8:2, to try and get the paint to flow nicely off the brush. I had to experiment constantly with thinning the paint as I went along. Frustratingly I thought that all the fiddly work would be done after doing the lines in dark grey. I was wrong. Doing gentle curves with an even hand and even thickness is very difficult and very slow work.

We stopped for lunch and then I spent another 4-5 hours getting it to this stage, where I need to let it dry before I add any highlights, and touches of red and yellow-gold for the badges and the disc caliper.

I tried for a graduated grey background, which is hard to see because of the reflection from the light source, and the large amount of added oil.