Monday 30 January 2017

Alain Jamar Design

This week's featured artist is Alain Jamar from Belgium.



Born in Liège, Belgium and living just kilometers from the epic road course of Spa-Francorchamps, Alain Jamar grew up with a love of cars and racing that has persisted to this day. 

Whether it was running at night the public portions of the road course at Francorchamps, or barreling along back roads in his Alfa Romeo, the fever ran high and hot for cars and speed.

Alain was trained at L’École Supérieure des Arts Saint-Luc, Liège in Advertising Design, and relocated to the States to pursue a career in graphic design and advertising. Over the years, his willingness to test himself against a challenging turn or measure of time led him to equally challenging projects with clients in the tech and entertainment industries, meeting imposing deadlines and producing work for the likes of Disney, Motorola, Philips, Xerox and many others.

While still engaged in graphic design, Alain started building a race car and competing near his home in southern California, and eventually became involved in automotive publishing, creating the Porsche enthusiast magazine, Velocity, as well as creating print advertising and design projects within the automotive racing community. His work with Velocity and the Porsche Owners Club has been recognized by Porsche Cars North America for its impact on the club racing community and for promotion of the marque.

Another off shoot of his love for cars was his eventual interest in fine art automotive illustration, which takes him to events, races, and concours in pursuit of subjects for his art.

Alain’s drawings are finely executed vector illustrations, available as art prints, and also as fully scalable art. You are just as likely to see his illustrations on the side of a racing transport as you are to see them on paper, and he sometimes designs livery for race cars as well.

Alain currently works in Adobe Illustrator as his medium, producing dynamic and detailed illustrations of a wide variety of cars, but the ones that go the fastest seem to be the ones he is always chasing. You can find his work online at Fine Art America, where is is available for purchase.

You can find out more and see more  of  Alain’s work on his website here. Alternatively keep up with his new pieces on his Facebook page here.

Below you can enjoy a s election of his works. As always, please respect copyright.

More featured artists here.







Monday 23 January 2017

Rainer Selzer

This week a different type of artists is featured in this section. This is when a great photographer manages to combine two of his love affairs, Photography and Slot Racing. This is the story of Rainer Selzer.



It was Exactly seven years ago (December 2009) when the passion of motor racing in scale 1:32 got a hold of Rainer.

“My aim was clear: I wanted to build a racetrack, which has the perfect setting for model racetrack pictures”, he explains.

After 4 years of construction, his Carrera race track was finally finished and he was able to compose the first photographs. This was also a good time to start to design his website, so he could share his work of passion with the world.

He built all the buildings from 300 gram photo cardboard. He also added more than 200 figures to the set which are all hand painted.

“Through my Slotracing hobby, I have discovered the joy of photography and I was thrilled when I finally was able to make the first photos” comments Rainer.

Although he was pretty happy with the results he was getting from his digital camera, he felt that the images required the appropriate depth.

After some search it was clear, that he needed a lens reflex camera with the possibility to control by the manual aperture setting, the depth of field.

Full of joy, he started photographing with his new camera, a Canon EOS 700 D with EF-S18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM.

Furthermore he bought studio lighting that gave him around 1000 watts of light.

To put the cars in motion, he still needed photoshop. Now he was satisfied with final images.

“My aim is, to photograph the slotcars so, that the viewer has to look twice if it’s a real car or not” Rainer explains.

Therefore, he always try to show the cars from it’s chocolate side!

Recently, he edited individual images with different filters, to give them a special touch of art. After a visit to the Porsche Museum in Zuffenhausen in May this year, he also started enjoying photographing full sized cars.

He concluded; “The photography gives me so much pleasure und I try to improve constantly”.

You can find more os Rainer’s work on his website here.

Also, why not follow his progress and see his latest works on Facebook, here and on Twitter here.

Below you can enjoy some of Rainer’s work. As always, please respect copyright.

More featured artists here.





Monday 16 January 2017

Shawn Dougherty Art

Another talented automotive artist, this week from the USA…


Shawn Dougherty was Born in December of 1967 and was raised in the small village of Greenwood Lake NY. He moved to coastal Georgia about 10 years ago.

Interested in art since he was a child, Shawn began with drawing his favorite comic book hero’s. Later he began focusing on science fiction and fantasy art until finally discovering his love of automotive art.

Never having pursued art professionally until recently, he has been what he calls an art hobbyist most of his life. While attending the Amelia Island concourse De’elegance Automotive show several years ago, he found himself inspired by the incredible works in the artist alley at the event and was motivated to try his hand at automotive art. He discovered he had a knack for it and being a car enthusiast himself, he thoroughly enjoyed the process of painting automobiles of all kinds. 

“Its the precision required, mixed with the reflective properties that I find so intriguing and interesting to work with.”

After sharing some of his work with fellow car enthusiasts he began to get requests for commission work for automotive portraits from members of the local car club, of which he was also a member. Since then,  he has been taking commissions and now enjoys painting a wide variety of automobiles ranging from old to new.

He will typically request a number of photographs of a patrons car and then picks one from which to work off of as a reference. Shawn will often change the background environment of the car portraits to add more drama to the subject and allow the vehicle to be the main focus of the piece. Typically working in acrylics on canvas, he also works in water colors, oils, pen and ink.

Aside from high school art class Shawn is a self taught artist and learns more with every new piece he creates. “For me, that’s the fun in it, learning something every time I paint a new subject. I view cars as an art form to begin with, so what better subject matter could one ask for?”

He is currently accepting commissions and is glad to offer prints of his existing work for interested party’s to purchase.

You can see more of Shawn’s work or contact him on Facebook at S Dougherty Art here.

or email at Shawn_Dougherty@bellsouth.netMore of his images as well as hundreds of other art features here.





Monday 9 January 2017

International Motorsports Graphics

Another Monday means another art feature. This week is a collaboration of a few artist who have formed IMG, International Motorsports Graphics.

People involved in IMG started nearly 10 years ago, back in 2007 with Robsworkshop. This workshop started making liveries for the game Batracer when it still had a huge fanbase and following.
The group had a lot of members that were also helped with learning how to create livery graphics with photoshop, GIMP and even paint in the early days.
Around 2011 and 2012 the game batracer, a racing manager game, was almost not played anymore so membership started to decline. As this was noticed the group started to think what the future could bring and they continued developing thier livery skills and car/template making.
They also started developing 3d style images. Disaster strikes the group when at some point they loose everything as their main forum provider disappeared!
That was a huge set back. They tried with a new forum provider (retroboards) but it didn't really worked out.
The forum was called robsworkshop reborn back then so they decided to make a whole new website.
Timo Mabbutt, Joni Hyttinen and Erick Kacino created IMG. It still has the same base as before as they all love livery building and although their style has evolved since the early days, they still make the best templates available on the internet.
Timo Mabbutt explains; "We also never asked any money for our contributions, its all fanbased. Just for the love as you could say."
IMG has about 20 very active members. Main members are Timo that does most of the spreading of IMG on the internet, Joni (WTF) that is the main template builder and livery maker, Erick (Kacinoman) who made the website and also builds templates on a very high level.
Rob the founder of it back in the day has started his own business and is very successful. Two others guys also evolved to main designers, Andrew and Robert who also have their own successful careers now.

You can join the IMG Forum here.

You can keep an eye on their work on Facebook here.

Here are some of their work for you to view. As always, please respect copyright.

More images here.





Monday 2 January 2017

Rallyeslot by Stephen Morrissey

A very different feature for our artist this week. Belfast born, Stephen Morrissey makes this wonderful miniatures of your race cars...

Born in Belfast in 1992, Stephen was always interested in motorsport, watching Formula One throughout the 00's.

During his teenage years he attended local rallies such as circuit of Ireland and Lurgan Park.

An avid model maker all his life, he noticed Frank Kelly's Escort mk2 during the 2014 Circuit of Ireland and decided to see if he could produce a self made replica.

After producing the model successfully he Contacted Frank, and the car featured heavily on his page. The following rally or Lurgan Park 2014 he presented the model to Frank in person with the intention of getting the roof signed. The car attracted a wide spectacle of attention from fans and competitors alike and Stephen waled away from the rally having 14 requests for cars to me made.

As news began to grow of his work, Stephen set up the social media page and brand name Rallyeslot to display his models. The name was picked as he specialised in 1:32 slot cars designed to race on a track but has since branched out to 1:24 & 1:43 die cast.

Soon after the page was created, orders came in thick and fast and he has produced over 70 models for competitors and fans all over the world, including Spain, Germany and the UK.

Stephen produced a 1:24 model for a well known driver Phil Harris which featured in Pacenotes rally magazine.

Stephens models include, Formula One, Touring cars but is specialised in local rally cars competing throughout the UK.

To this day Stephen is still producing made to order models, and has taken on the competing aspect of motorsport where he runs a Peugeot 106 in the ANICC Sprint & Hill Climb Chamionship donned in the Rallyeslot livery to promote his work (Team Rallyeslot Peugeot).

You can contact him by email on; rallyeslot@hotmail.com

Even better, keep in touch with on Facebook here.

More images here.

A few examples of his work are featured below.