Basically, a mate of mine passed away, and a few of us would like to get a tattoo in his honour, and we would like to incorporate the blue honda crx del sol, his pride and joy, into the tattoo.

I have seen these cartoonified characature things that you can get of cars, but they seema bit OTT really, so ideally, this car, but made to look like a drawing or sketch would be ideal.

basically, this look...



But this car...




I have tried to do this myself using photoshop but all i managed was a blurry mess, so if anyone could help me then it would be greatly appreciated, many thanks.

That's a nice thought but maybe you should give it a few weeks before you decide to get a tattoo. If you decide to go through with it, a good tattoo artist will be able to draw what you're looking for with just the pic of his car. If he can't I would go somewhere else.

Quote from flymike91 :

a good tattoo artist will be able to draw what you're looking for with just the pic of his car. If he can't I would go somewhere else.

This. If he can't draw it on paper himself, then he's not going to make a good job of doing it in ink on your arm/face/genitalia.

The attached image any good as a starter for someone? I didn't make it, just found it on Google.

Thanks for that idea beefyman, hadnt though of going down the vector drawing route.

And so, with my (extremely!) limited knowledge of photoshop, and about 3 hours on it, i have come up with this so far...



Far from good, but well on the way to what i want, just need to do some work on the serious pixilation i have on the wheels and some other edges and ill be happier, probably wont even use this as a tattoo base, i just like the look of it as a picture in general, there is one thing that i really want to do but cant, which is to have a shadow under the car, but no matter what tutorials i follow, and whatever layer gaussion blur stuff i try, it never works, i either get the background black and blurry, or nothing happens, so if someone wanted to maybe download this and add a shadow for me then i really wouldnt mind

Select the grey background using magic wand tools + whatever other selection tools you need to get a clean edge

Press delete to remove grey background and then put a new transparent layer underneath the car layer. Use paintbrush tool with a soft brush and 50% or so opacity, draw shadow under car. It takes some time/skill to make it look perfect. Ideally do it in one hit, once you start touching in areas you get uneven shadow and it looks a mess. This is how I'd do a shadow but other people may have other suggestions.

5 second bodge job example attached below

(In this example the shadow is too dark and generally rubbish :rolleyes

Marginally better example attached..

It still looks dodgy because of the remaining white background around the wheels, but that's down to my lazy selection effort