Sideways Stratos

About the car:

The legendary Lancia Stratos HF. What can be said about this successful car that hasn’t been said already? World Rally Championship winner three times in a row (1974, 1975 and 1976) and race car winner at 1974 Targa Florio, five times winner of the Tour de France Automobile and three editions of Giro d'Italia automobilistico.

On top of that, the iconic wedge design from the pen of Marcello Gandini at Bertone is just a joy to look at. Add to it some classic pop-up headlights, and you have every car enthusiast ingredient to love or at least hold this car to a high appreciation level.

About the illustration:

I always like to explore new things when doing my illustrations, and this is no different. There are two things here in place: painterly look (with vectors!) and playing with negative space as a way to create visuals.

Negative space:

I was inspired to do this piece years ago (literally, it was 2021) by my good friend Luis Ferrera and his Stratos piece that you can see here.

Of course I wasn’t going to copy it (unless I was doing a study), but the inspiration is strong. I created a new reference with my usual method (video game photo mode, Forza Horizon 4 in this case) and you can see it here:

The idea was to have some negative space created by the dust from the car, hiding a tree line and some crowd. I honestly couldn’t make the crowd work with my current skills, so I dropped them altogether, but the tree line ended up looking nice, I think!

Painterly look:

As many know, I am mostly used to work with vector art, which is normally much more defined and structured than raster (or traditional) art, but it is always cool to be able to reproduce a painterly look with digital art.

This is obviously harder with vector art, due to how vectors work and render the visuals, but thanks to the amazing Affinity Designer brushes made by Sav Scatola (which you can buy here), you can enjoy some painterly and textured brushes within your vector art.

Fair warning: these are not easy to use, and I don’t even think I use them properly 😂, but it’s a start and will keep practicing. I hope you find this artwork interesting and conveying what I intended. If not, I will keep working on improving to get there!

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