Practical advice on creating your motorsport masterpiece...

Racing and painting are a disparate pair of disciplines and rather like it's counterpart, painting is all about practice. Here, though, we offer you a significant legup with a whole bunch of sound advice.

THE BEGINNING
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Odds are you’ve already got a gazillion livery ideas in your head; stop right there and go check out the editor. Look at the vinyl shapes you have access to and imagine creating something with them. If this is your first Forza car design we’d recommend opting for one of your simpler ideas. Something that’s going to be challenging, but not to the point
of frustration. You should also start to think about which car the design is going to end up on, go and have a look at the car now… will the design work with the body shape? It’s essential to have a rough idea of the end product in your head before you begin. We decided on a tribute to the Master Chief. It’s worth making a sketch of your design before you begin. If only for reference purposes it’ll make the whole process much easier. If you’re feeling particularly creative you can even try knocking up a rough version in some visual software. It doesn’t really matter if you do this in something high-end like Illustrator or something as basic as MS Paint; either way it’ll give you a good idea of the complexity of the image and it’ll force you to start thinking about the kind of shapes needed to make up the image.

YOUR CANVAS
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First off, you’ll be needing a car. However, we suggest leaving your vehicle of choice to the side for now. Instead pick your ‘canvas car’, something you can use to create your key art. The best canvas cars are those with large flat hardtop roofs, like the Civic you can see here. Because of the camera angles, lack of body panel joins and other obstructions like air vents or door handles, the roof is the easiest part of the car to work on. Once you’ve got your car, paint it white (or black if your design is going to be light), it’ll make lining up shapes a lot easier. We also found that a grid came in handy to help with positioning. Don’t worry about getting the exact size yet, overall proportion is more important. As a rule of thumb it’s also better to make your design as big as possible now and then shrink it later on.

BASIC SHAPES
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Start off by laying down the basic shape for your design. At this point don’t worry about the details, just concentrate on making the basic shape perfect using square blocks, triangles and circles to start to form an outline. All of the controls are shown at the bottom of the screen, but don’t forget that you can use the D-pad as well as the analogue stick to position, rotate and resize shapes. This is often a lot easier than using the stick and allows precise measurements; you can also check the X and Y values of each shape by glancing at the bottom of the screen. We’re making our base shape here solid black so that we can keep a thin black outline for the final version… this will not only help the design to stand out when it’s on the car, but it will also allow us to use the design on any colour bodywork we choose.

… continued