Dragons
Fairies
& The Wild West
Collaboration Project
Car: Ford F100 Truck
Goal: Turn this old girl to look like a story book
Yvetta’s Dream – 10 years old
Let’s travel back to 1980, when Yvetta was only 10 years old. At school, she would regular draw 2 specific cars, one of which was a Cadillac, the other a Ford F100. She had seen these cars in movies and loved their shape. She loved cars, she had always wished she could own these cars when she grew up.
Her teachers looked at funny because they were quite expensive and rare at the time, though they never discouraged her from chasing her dreams of owning these cars.
First business idea – Age 13
Yvetta always wanted to make something and sell it. Her first idea was to make and sell pillows and cushions, this idea literally came to her at the age of 13. Interestingly, she pursued this idea and did not hold back!
Purchased F100 – Age 14
One day, Yvetta and her mother were driving past a car yard. She saw a yacht and a Ford F100.
She Yelled “STOP!”, made her mother pull into the car yard, she felt she had spotted her dream car. Her mum was confused by this. Given she was only 14 with no licence, how was she going to drive it? Yvetta’s mother asked, why do you want it now?
Yvetta said, she wants to start her own business, she needed a big car to make it all work. Her mum was very supportive, and agreed to buy the car for her.
It was in perfect condition, when she first got the car it was painted white with a red stripe on it and it was the automatic version.
For the record, Yvetta never drove the car underage 🙂
Left School & Started Business – Age 15
The legal requirement to obtain a licence was 15 and a half years old. As soon as she could get her licence, she did. Shortly after, Yvetta quit school and started started her own business. She started using this vehicle to move stock in her new business, selling pillows.
She drove everywhere, short or long distances, it did not matter, her main target was the markets. From Flemington markets to Canberra to Bathurst, everywhere from that day until this day.
Reliable and perfect – After age 50
Owning and driving this car since the age of 15, she never had any issues. It was reliable, never a break down and for Yvetta it felt like it was an extension of her. After 30+ years of usage, to this date, nothing has ever gone wrong. She literally only had to maintain it over it’s lifetime.
Now in 2020, Yvetta wanted to bring the car back to its glory days, when it was brand new, of course with a lot of magic!
Memories from 1993
Creative Pathways
She has always been a fan of tattoos and admired them on other people. However, she was never game enough to tattoo herself. So, she wanted to ‘tattoo’ her F100.
She has always loved dragons and cowboys as she was growing up. This was the inspiration for the full design but let’s face it. We can’t have cowboys and dragons together in the same scenerey.. It just doesn’t work. So, we decided to run with a split design but instead of a ‘split centre line’ we have created a full blend design.
Design Process
The images for this design came straight from a children’s book. They were of course small and low resolution. We had to make it fit a car, and not just a normal size car, a big F100 truck. Any imperfections, including pixelations were going to be extremely obvious.
Our plan of attack was to scan the images straight out of the book at the highest resolution possible. We did this, then ran it through for test prints. It was still pixelated in life size. We had to ‘auto artisan’ these images.
So, we started hand drawing, every little fine detail was added in, all of the images were literally drawn over on the computer screen with added detail which didn’t exist in the original book.
This consumed hours and hours, but the end result was incredible.
Now, it was time to repeat it with the wild west… Having said that, it was much easier to find a good, high resolution image relating back to RM Williams, this definitely sped up the second half of the project.
We continued to blend the designs until it all come together nicely and had a good sense of ‘flow’.
Fast Forward to Designs
Normally, you would see the designs printed on paper. This time we decided to upload the images directly from the digital render. We wanted you to see, exactly how close we can get with digital render to real life application.
Check out the images below, they look just like the book!
Materials and supplies
For this project, we used the traditional Avery Dennison print media and the high gloss Avery Dennison Laminate film. As usual we reached out to Graphic Art Mart, one of our supplier partners to get the ball rolling.
Installation Photos
This was a tricky one, the car being quite old, had a lot of edges which were rough.
We knew the wrap film wouldn’t want to stick to certain parts of the vehicles. Especially in the inner seams and edges, where it was most likely going to lift. We decided to tackle the project a little different.
Instead of taking the wrap film to every single edge, we were strategic and decided to stop some of the edges short by about 15mm. This allowed us to keep the wrap film on the surfaces we knew it would stick to. The remainder of the edges needed to be prepped and sprayed in black to hide the edges.
It worked very well, when we finished the project, we knew we could be confident with the finish that was provided.
Install Complete!
The next lot of photos show the full finished design including some of the detail in the artwork. The dragons side was definitely our favourite.
Prepping for the photo shoot
The prep for the photo shoot needed to quick! We actually had to give the car back to the customer the following day.
So, we improvised.
- Set up the shoot to be in front of our old shop
- We got our usual model, Naz Bright
- Naz brought several different costumes to suit the theme
We felt it was important to capture the dragons and fairies side of the car. Significant amount of time and effort went into this side!
Next, it was time to collaborate all of the photos and create the final design. We wanted to present 2 photos for this project, for different purposes.
The first one was a clean look, taking the vehicle into a fantasy castle location.
The second one’s focus was to be wild and imaginative!
Check out the final edits, just below!
