Apr 25 2013
motorsport, Photoshop, Poster

Nihon Tour Event Posters

The online motor racing club that I frequent(ly attempt to organise and race in) with a group of friends often needs event posters for the races. It’s all a bit of fun, but if you’ve organised a race and are also a graphic artist with a healthy interest in motor sport, why wouldn’t you make an event poster for the race, fictional or otherwise? Well, I did, and so here is a series of 7 posters, one for each event in the Really Rubbish Racing Nihon Tour. Apologies for the Japanese, it may be completely wrong, but that’s more the fault of Adam or Google Translate than anything.

Nihon Tour Event Posters

The design that encapsulates all 7 events is available as a T-Shirt here.

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Jan 03 2013
Cartography, motorsport, Photoshop

Circuit Britain

My mum’s career was in cartography. She’s drawn maps for the London Borough of Barnet and had many others printed in Geographical Magazine over the course of several years. She also drew them for fun, her illustrated scrapbook of travels around Peru and Bolivia are filled with hand-painted map masterpieces. She is a huge influence on my love of maps and drawing maps. Once interested in motor sport, I would begin doodling track layouts and maps anywhere I could. All my old school books are littered with squiggly shapes that, to the untrained eye, just look like squiggly shapes. But those of us in the know can quickly see what they are!

Starting the year as I mean to go on – getting back into drawing maps – this post brings together my love of maps and motorsport. “Circuit Britain” is based on a simplified outline of the British Isles, and within its boundaries contains 3 pit complexes and a total of 6 possible layouts. As requested on Twitter showing off the initial sketch, also included in the final design is a karting circuit shaped like Northern Ireland. The original sketch was drawn over a year ago and below is a brand new ‘aerial photography’* version. There are several more sketches in the series, including circuits based on the geographic outlines of the United States and Japan. I intend to realise those over the coming months.

Circuit Britain by ajokay

* Imagery from around the outskirts of the circuit borrowed from imagery on Google Maps. Prizes for guessing where.

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Dec 06 2012
Photography, Photoshop

Season’s Greetings, Photoshop Style!

My first update for a while, and it’s a wintery one. I’ve been so busy with my day job with my new employer that it’s been difficult to find time to work on any personal projects. But in the wind-down (yeah, right) to the festive season an offer dropped into my inbox from a fellow member of my racing club that I couldn’t refuse, asking me to ‘Christmas-ise’ a photograph for Peterbrough-based KM Packaging‘s company emailed Christmas card. It’s been a long time since I’ve done any real digital manipulation work with photographs, so this was a great opportunity to dust off the cobwebs. I think it came out pretty well!

And I think I’ll take this opportunity to say “Happy Gift Giving Month, everyone!”

Have a look at the small gallery below for the before and after. Original photograph taken by Charles Ward Photography.

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Jul 16 2012
livery, motorsport, update

Stephen Jones – Racing Superstar!

Remember Steve Jones? The Australian racing driver who I designed a car livery for based around his helmet colours? Well, unfortunately for me, but most definitely amazing news for him, is that he has since signed to race for a team. This means he has to run in their colours (a rather uninspiring plain-white), and has had to retire his old car and livery for the time being. Of course, I like to think it was the head-turning paint-job that got him noticed, but that’s proably not thw whole story.

But back to more good news… his website is up and fully functional, including plenty of photos, race previews, reviews and video highlights, edited by a certain Damon Smedley (trust me, you’ll have heard of him one day!). So go and take a look, give him your support, follow him on twitter, and ideally your sponsorship money to help further his career, meaning he can get back to using the flame coloured car that matches his hair colour so very well!

Steve Jones Racing

Jun 23 2012
livery, mention, motorsport

On Speed… Again!

Remembering the livery I’d designed for him a couple of months before, car nut and motorsport fan Gareth Jones sent an email my way asking for another design to illustrate his latest podcast with. Of course, I obliged, and set about designing a Gareth Jones on Speed Formula One livery for episode #172 wherein Gareth and pals discussed their top three motorsport liveries of all time. And here it is below, encompassing many colour schemes (generally a no-no, but had to let that slide here). The white red and green of Wales, black and orange of Sniff Petrol, and the maroon of ‘Zog‘. The driver is, of course, F1′s unluckiest driver, Taki Inoue.

So that’s now 2 beers Gareth owes me at the Le Mans 24 Hours next year…

gareth jones on speed livery

Apr 25 2012
competition, livery, motorsport

Dunlop Art Car Competition

Every year Dunlop Tyres hold an art car competition. The prize is to see your livery applied to a GT car competing in the world-famous Le Mans 24 Hour race. This year the car is the Ferrari F458 Italia of British team JMW Motorsport.

Looking through the brief that Dunlop supply, it’s clear that many of the other entries decided to ignore the rules on logo usage, and the ability to be able to replicate the design on the real car. With these important factors in mind, I chose to go for a simple yet recognisable design of the distinctive yellow giving way to a dark grey via a cracking effect. You know the kind of cracks that appear in a dry riverbed, or a hot, dusty road. The concept being that the Dunlop tyres provide so much grip, they’ll rip up the road!

Anyway, you can view my entry here, and hopefully you’ll vote for it too. That might require you to ‘like’ it on Facebook, but hey, that’s how things are done now, apparently.

Dunlop Art Car Competition

 

 

 

Mar 02 2012
livery, motorsport

My First Livery

Whilst I’ve been designing race car liveries on paper and computer for years and years now, I’m ecstatic to announce my first design that’s ever made it to the bodywork of a real life racing machine.

This is the Formula Vee car of Australian driver Steve Jones. I designed his team logo earlier this year, but he asked me to go one further and come up with a design for the upcoming season. He’s happy, I’m happy, and I look forward to seeing it cross the finish line ahead of everyone else on the track.

Many thanks to Joff Altan for the brilliant 3D model and render of the car. The real thing will be launched next Friday, 9th March at 8pm GMT, at which point I hope to have some photos of the car on-track to show.

 

Feb 12 2012
3d, livery, motorsport, update

Personal Projects Updates

Over the weekend I’ve added a few updates to some of the sections of the site that were thin on the ground with content, mostly the Personal Projects pages.

I’m also not far from showing off the final designs of my first racing car livery, thanks to Stephen Jones and his up-coming season of Australian Formula Vee! More on that in the next post!

For now, here are some links to the updated pages:

ArtworkReally Rubbish Racing

Motorsport Liveries3D Visualisation

Jan 29 2012
livery, mention, motorsport

On Speed

Following January’s news that Peugeot were to pull out of endurance racing with immediate effect, tv presentor and motorsport fan Gareth Jones announced on Twitter that he wondered what would be done with the cars. Suggesting to him that he should buy one and start his own team, he agreed and jokingly called for a whip-round. Of course, I said I’d design the livery for him. He gave me a list of colours. What he wasn’t expecting was me to fire up my copy of Forza Motorsport 4, buy a 908, and paint it up for him. He was so thrilled with the outcome that he displayed the photo below on his website and gave me a mention in episode #161 of his ‘Gareth Jones On Speed‘ podcast.Team On Speed Peugeot 908

Jan 29 2012
3d, competition, mention, motorsport

Competition Winner

It was quite a while ago now, but in December 2008, a Formula One website that I frequent – the excellent F1 Fanatic.co.uk – ran a competition to design a motor racing circuit. There were two categories – Fantasy and Realistic. I decided to enter my final year university piece into the Fantasy category, as the circuit was originally designed as a demolition derby track with a landslide, tunnel, crossover and a jump over a broken bridge.

To my surprise and delight, my entry was picked as the best fantasy design and I won myself £100, which was a great help in the run up to Christmas.

Red Rock Raceway

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