I'm still trying to figure this program out on my own so don't be too harsh in your critisism. I know I missed a few things and there are some rough bits but after spending the last four hours on this I think I'm making some good headway.
I started with this image of my car for lighting reference
I drew all the lines in illustrator with the pencil tool, then smoothed them out when I had them where I wanted them. I changed the perspective to a dead on side view. I've done the car from this angle so many times I can draw it from memory now.
I did most of the filling with gradients, then jumped to Imageready where I put on the finishing touches like using the film grain filter to simulate metallic in the paint, and basically cleaning up any inconsistencies with the airbrush.
I'm happy with my end result, which was a 4096x3072 TIFF file. I printed a 4'x3' poster for the living room wall beside my Micra's hood.
I think that with some practice I can cut my time to get an image done in half. I think I am much faster with photoshop doing images like these but they don't blow up as cleanly as this did.
