Livery Design and Installation
So we all know that one of the best parts of race cars is the cool designs, right? Well, I've wanted to a livery on this car and finally decided to pull the trigger. Now since this is Grassroots Motorsports, I took the grassroots approach and did the design and installation all on my own. I don't know anything about photoshop, so to start getting an idea of what I wanted to do, I picked a picture of my car that had a good side profile, taped a piece of paper to my laptop screen (it's an old E36 M3ty laptop) and traced the picture. From there, I made copies of the blank tracing so I could try multiple livery designs. Then I made copies again and used colored pencils to try out different colors. I took initial inspiration from one of Hyundai's liveries but then did my own spin on it.
As an engineering student, the design softwares I am used to are usually not quite meant for art, but I was able to make do with AutoCAD. To get the shapes, I imported the picture into AutoCAD and drew the shapes in AutoCAD with lines, splines, and polylines. I was able to draw them over the picture to make sure I got the proportions right and scaled them based on measurements I took from the car. For logos, I got vector images of them online, converted them to .dxf files, and brought them into the drawing. And for letters and numbers, I just used a text box and then used "Explode Text" to convert it to polylines. I added a lot more than just what is in the sketch, but here you can see everything that I had designed. Everything was broken up into 24"x100" boxes because I used 24" wide rolls of vinyl and the vinyl cutter would only do up to 100" at a time. On the left is everything to be cut out of the Mint vinyl, and on the right is Traffic Blue.
After getting the AutoCAD designs done, I had to import the .dxf files into Adobe Illustrator and save them as .ai files since that was what the vinyl cutter accepted. My college has a professional vinyl cutter in our engineering labs that I was able to use, so I supplied my own Oracal 651 vinyl in Mint and Traffic Blue and TapeManBlue transfer tape. I didn't know much about what I was buying and I bought High-Tack transfer tape. I found that that was probably too sticky for the Oracal 651 and it was difficult to get the transfer tape off without pulling the vinyl with it, so I think in the future I would get a less tacky transfer tape.
Once I got everything cut and weeded (which took a couple hours), it was time to try my hand at installation. I had never done any vinyl work beyond small decals, so I was a little bit worried but went at it. So for the first piece, I started with one of the front fenders, I didn't know much about technique, so I just did what I had done with decals and tried applying it dry. That didn't go well. I got so many creases and wrinkles just from sticking to itself and not laying smoothly. So after that, I did some research (that I admittedly should've done first) and tried using soapy water on the next piece. With the soapy water, it laid so smoothly and easily.
I made the main shapes taller and longer than I needed so that I could just use a razor to trim them at the panel gaps and to get the horizontal lines where I wanted and matching the other pieces, I used knifeless tape. That was another first for me and it took some getting used to getting it started but once I got the hang of it, I loved how easy it made it.
After I got the hang of everything, I kept going with the rest of the car before heading back to campus to reprint replacements for two pieces I had messed up.
At the end of it all, I learned a lot and had so much fun. I definitely didn't get a show-quality result, but at only around $100 in material cost and maybe 20 hours of my own labor, I'm pretty dang happy with the results. Anyway, now for the reveal.
A close-up of what I did for the wheels.
