Ugh. For some reason or another I had a craving to draw a real production car. I’m not sure where that itch came from, but all I know is that it needed to be scratched. Trouble is that I didn’t really have any particular car in mind – I think it was just more of a curiosity to see if I could draw something that exists today. So with that in mind, I grabbed the nearest Car and Driver magazine and started thumbing through it until I found a picture that I felt I could replicate myself.

That first picture (it was an advertisement actually) happened to be a bright red 2012 Fiat 500. No, not the Abarth Edition – just the standard model. I’ve been curious about these cars ever since they were released, so it didn’t take but a second to make the descision to choose this one as the car I would be drawing and rendering.

The sketch actually turned out surprisingly well. I had some strong worries about not being able to replicate the shape of this little Fiat accurately, but I was able to have a nice working pencil underlay in about 20 minutes. Well, it wasn’t really pencil, because I do all my car renderings on a Wacom tablet with SketchBook Pro – but you get the idea.

It took about another hour or two to tighten up the sketch and get some nice line work laid down, and by that time I was pretty much burned out on it. Two weeks went by before I actually started applying the color and reflections, and I just finished it up tonight.

Am I happy with the way this Fiat 500 drawing turned out? Meh. I am happy with the the underlying line art and the base color application. But wow…I learned very quickly that I have very little patience for all the little details! Upon completion of this drawing, I have newfound respect for anybody who can pull of a really high detailed hand-drawn car rendering. My attention span is way to short to do something like this – so I guess that means that I much more enjoy loose sketches and renderings over the tight photo-realistic stuff.

This could have been so much better if my attention span wasn’t so short. There’s a lot I could do to tighten this up and make it look better, but to be honest with you…I’d rather be done with it and move on to the next one.