Getting Started
Using a grid
To get a picture onto our car we have to draw it.
No cutting and pasting here to bring an image into the game. Although, once we have a drawing in game, we can save it and move it between cars. It's old fashioned drawing brought kicking and screaming into the computer age. You get an image, you look at it and you draw what you see.
If you're like me, this is a daunting task. Where do you start? As soon as a few shapes are down nothing looks right, nothing is the right size and every correction just makes the whole mess more impossible. A grid helps make sense of it all. It gives an easy reference for size and spacing. You can see that things are the right size, in the right place and facing the right direction, without too much effort. I've always used a grid for drawing. To be honest, it takes a job that I wouldn't be able to do, and makes it possible. And of course, the more you do, the easier it gets.
An even grid is drawn onto an image, then a corresponding one is drawn onto the painting surface and used as a reference to draw onto.
Here the grid is used to scale the drawing as well as copy it.
If we were drawing onto paper then the grid would be at the bottom and would disappear as we paint, but here we are using a computer, and the grid can stay on top all the time.
I've settled on a 6x9 grid and then I've made it more detailed by drawing in the diagonals. This gives me the drawing surface shown below. It looks cluttered, but works well.
I can get away with such a detailed grid because it's drawn on my computer over a source picture and printed onto photographic paper. The grid lines are very fine, overlaid on my paper they don't get in the way of the picture and so many of them make it easy to space the drawing. I'll go into detail later how to use the grid in the game so it doesn't get in the way of the drawing.
If this grid was drawn using pen and ruler, it would obscure the source picture so much you wouldn't make it out. You might need two source images, in that case, one to draw a grid over and another to keep clear. Getting the right type and size of grid that works for you can be trial and error, but it's worth while making the effort now, at the start of a drawing. Getting the right scale is important here, as well. I find that if the drawing is done large and then shrunk down more than 50% it looses it's crispness so I like to try and paint as close to the finished size as possible.
Drawing a grid
Start out with the capital I.
A: Decrease the width ( X axis ) to 0.01 and increase the height ( Y axis ) to go to the edge of the mini.
B: Stamp ( Y button ) and move in increments of 40 to end up with 10 vertical lines. Keep the Y axis at 0.00
C: Stamp another one and rotate to 90 angle. Stamp and move 40 units a time up and down on the Y axis till 7 lines are done.
D: Stamp another one, change the thickness, rotate to 135 angle, stamp and move at 40 unit amounts till the grid is filled side to side.
E: Stamp another one, change the angle to 45 and finish the job off.
One last thing before saving. It's a good idea to take a little time to arrange the layers. The grid gets used a lot and it's handy being able to find each line easily. Sometimes these thin lines don't flash when selected.
I take two lines near the centre of the grid, one horizontal and one vertical ( coloured red in the diagram ) , select them, cut ( X button ) , move them to the front layer and insert ( Y button ) . This brings them to the front of the grid where they are easy to find. These two lines are used when moving the drawing round the painting area.
Then go through the rest of the layers and cut and move where necessary to bring them into order. Often you want to find a particular line to change colour or transparency or something.
Saving and loading the grid
Here's a good tip if you're just starting out. It's a good idea to organise the place where the saved drawings are stored. In this game it's called the design catalogue and is found in the painting menu.
It has a fault. Every time you save a file it's put at the bottom. You can't rearrange it. Every time you want to use the last file saved, you have to scroll down past everything that went before. The more you paint, the longer this takes.
The way round it is to reserve a few files at the start as temporary files. Ten would be a good number, I guess. If you're just starting, then you could name them temp 1 through to temp 10, for example. But if you're like me and never thought of this before, then you're stuck with odd names for your temp files. Because you can't rename them.
To make your front files, temp files, simply load the file onto a car, select and save as a new vinyl group under a different name. This will be saved at the back, of course, and the original file at the front can be written over as needed. You're just stuck with the name.
Of course, be very careful that any temp files that you want to keep are renamed. It would be too easy to write over an important drawing before it had been saved at the other end of the catalogue.
When ever you load this grid onto a Mini, simply move it to the right 125 units and it will be centred on the roof. Very handy if you delete the grid halfway through a drawing. It's easy to load and put back in the same place.
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