Painting is not only about talent, and the creation process is far more complex that it may appear. There are endless rules, and several do's and don't's that escape the eye of the casual viewer. Atlas F1's GP illustrator Bruce Thomson brings you closer to the experience of creating a piece of art

Finished!

At least, I think so. I generally try to arrange to finish my paintings at least a week before they are due. When you have been working on something for as long as a painting like this takes, there is a tendency to lose sight of it; to get caught up in the small details of the painting and fail to see what's happening in the larger picture. If there is anything to be adjusted on this painting it is likely to be minor.

As you can see, I've filled in the white "graphic" streaks in the grass and I like the way that this has turned out. I think that that adjustment gives the painting a more cohesive feel. I also felt that the grass was looking a little too green, so I painted over it with very thin transparent layers of bronze yellow (about the colour of dijon mustard) to push the grass to a slightly warmer tone.

I wasn't ecstatic with the way that the track was looking last week. I knew that I was going to have to add some tone, but I also felt that the manner in which I had laid the paint down wasn't supporting the image. I had painted the track in much the same way as the car - with transparent washes of colour, in this case, predominantly twilight blue, bronze yellow and mars black.

The difficulty I was having with the track was that it was appearing a little too grainy for my liking. This is generally what you would want asphalt to look like, except for the fact that I'm focused on the car, not the track, and therefore the track should look quite smooth or blurred to enhance the car's sense of speed. Addressing this was quite simple. All I had to do was to paint on thinned washes of titanium white on the track. I thinned the white sufficiently to ensure that it wouldn't lighten the tone of the track too dramatically, but merely flattened the grainy nature of the track painting. This worked because adding white makes that part of the painting at least partially opaque, and opaque colour tends to be smoother than transparent, especially on illustration board of the type that I am using.

Having completed that I was almost done. I went back to the car and darkened up some areas a little more, to compensate for the darkness of the road and cleaned up some of the logos. I strengthened the outline of the car in places where slight overlaps of the track painting had weakened them. After considering it for about 15 minutes, and holding it up in front of a mirror to try to identify any obvious (or not so obvious) flaws, I was satisfied that it was complete. The only thing left to do was to add my signature on the bottom left hand corner, which I proceeded to do.

I spent about 12 hours on the painting last week, which brings me to a final total of a whopping 92 hours. This is rather unusual for me, and is not fully explained by the earlier error that I made which necessitated my restarting the painting 10-odd hours in. Probably the greatest reason for the excessive amount of time it took me to complete this was the fact that I moved house in the middle of the painting, and with all that that entailed, it meant that I was doing the painting in smaller blocks of time than I usually would. If I had been able to spend eight to 12 hours a day on it, I'm pretty sure that I would have been able to finish it in a little over a week, or in around 60-65 hours. As it was, I was painting it in one to three hour segments, which is far from ideal. Despite this, I think that the painting turned out well, and am pleased with the result.

Thanks to everybody who took the time to follow along with the painting, and to all those who took the time to write me with their compliments and constructive criticism! Most importantly, I'd like to thank everybody for having the kindness not to remind me of my promise in the first installment of this column to try to have this done in time for the first Grand Prix of the year... what I really meant was "in time for Monaco..."

Contact the Author Contact the Editor