thinking outside the box Cars INSPIRATIONAL ART
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Xara Photo & Graphic Designer and Designer Pro are the top choice for creating car art; the drawing tools are perfect for creating reflections and transparency effects, ideal for shiny paintwork and chrome and for windows, and the Named and Linked Color features really come into their own.  All of which are demonstrated by some great examples in this month’s Inspirational Art. Our first example is from Ron Duke, whose work originally inspired many other Xara artists to try their hand at cars. If you enjoy these examples then take a few moments to browse through back issues of Inspirational Art (via the drop down menu at the top of this page), you’ll find a couple of other car themes and one issue focussed on Ron Duke. 
Graham Ward (Gray on TalkGraphics) You may have seen some of Graham’s remarkable aeroplane images on TalkGraphics, or indeed in past issues of Inspirational Art, but there’s a few cars in there too. Here’s one of our favorites, Miller racing cars from the 1920s, first shown in this thread on TalkGraphics. There’s some use of bitmaps in the background, the cars are drawn - the wireframe version tells you something about how they were drawn. 
Mohamed Elhlaly (Black Panther on TalkGraphics) Eye candy! And Mohammed has even given you some help in choosing what color to order. You can find the original TalkGraphics post here and you can see more of Mohamed’s work in the Xara Gallery - plus he was our featured artist in the January 2012 Inspirational Art.
Zeb Just because it’s a car, the style doesn’t have to be photo-realistic. Zeb is the master of cartoons and we’ve often featured his work in Inspirational Art, this is one of the images from his gallery collection on graphics.com.
Evgeny Rogachev Here’s two excellent examples from Evgeny.  The smoke and sparks bitmap effect on the Mazda RX-7 seem to be a bit controversial (this TalkGraphics post) but we think they add a bit of excitement.  The BMW was also offered on TalkGraphics with and without the background (and Evgeny is another Xara user who has made really good use of Linked Colors). You can see more of his work in the Xara Gallery.
Paul Saumure (Psaumure on TalkGraphics). “My first car project that got balled up ... but I got the named colors right” according to Paul in this TalkGraphics thread (and this image was also part of his collection as Featured Artist on the Xara Xone).
A Wrigley Andrew also made a great car post in the Xara Art Gallery this month (see Mustang), which helped us decide on this month’s Inspirational Art theme. So it seems fair to give him the final spot for this month. This comes from an older TalkGraphics post, Ford GT.
Ron Duke Ron posted an image in TalkGraphics a couple of weeks ago (1960 Chevrolet Impala, you can see it here) that made us think, yep, it’s time to do another Inspirational Art on cars.  The 1955 Chevy below dates back to a post in TalkGraphics in 2006, a classic Ron Duke image and a beautiful car too (they don’t make them like that any more).  And you can see more work from Ron Duke in the Xara Gallery.
This is another image by Mohamed, but don’t miss the TalkGraphics thread, because it shows some close-ups, an exploded layer view and again your color options for that Morgan order.
It would be easy to carry on, there are so many other great examples. But this is already way longer than our normal feature, so we’re just going to have to store them up for another future issue!