Category: Primary

Dude Perfect – Scrubbing one Livery and Painting Another

Dude Perfect is a popular US comedy group. They are mainly famous for viral trick shots and stunts. The brief involved creating a racing car livery for a potential sponsorship deal. The only issue was that the car imagery provided already had a livery.

Adding elements to images in Photoshop is tough. Removing them even more so. There are tools within the software that can automate the process. However, the results are highly dependent on the nature of both the foreground and background of the image. The end results can range from “perfect first time”, to “why am I doing this?”.

I felt instinctively that this was one of those jobs where I would be better off doing it by hand.

Striping out the elements was easy enough. The hardest part was the large 66 on the side door. In the end it was easier to create a gradient and mask it onto the door that to clone other part of the image, or airbrush it.

The hardest part was the most basic visual change. The dark grey colouring. It's very easier to lose tonal subtleties if you just dark selected portions of the image. I had to use several shadow and highlight overlays to retain a realistic livery base colour.

The huge DP overlays were somewhat easier in terms of shading, but they did require some manual distortion (which basically comes down to educated guesswork) to take them from 2D to Faux 3D.

There just a few finishing touches which mainly involved adding branding to the car and rescuing the FORD logo which had been knocked into the bacground during some earlier colour grading.

The Condition of music?

All art aspires towards the condition of music. Why? Perhaps it's because music is the only art-form which is non-representational. Music needs nothing but itself.

Emmanuel Kant dismissed music for this very reason. He called it enjoyment rather than culture.

It is important to note that not all music can be treated this way. Richard Wagner drew a distinction between abstract, or absolute music, which needed no themes or meaning whatsoever, and program music, which was thematic.

The quote at the top of this page comes from the Victorian art critic Walter Pater, who was commenting on the trend for pictorial arts to move from representational forms to more abstract forms. Music never had that need as music has no need to represent anything. What you hear is what there is.

This applies to the Beatles as much as it does to Beetheoven.

The rhythm of typography, the tonal shift of colour.

Why so many famous graphic designers started off doing music covers.

famous albums and their stories