1958 MGA Drawing

This week I was fortunate to get to create this 1958 MGA drawing for its owner. I haven’t drawn many British cars, so this one is a unique challenge. This particular car has some racing pedigree – it was raced in the SCCA in the 1960s, which is where it got its louvered hood.

This is the largest drawing I’ve made so far – the car is drawn on Strathmore toned gray, and I ordered their extra large 18×24 pad to draw it on.

I started with a rough pencil sketch on the gray paper. The tire diameter is 2″ – by comparison, most of my drawings have 1″ outside diameter tires.

Next, I layered in the line work. I started with Micron 02 and added Micron 05 & 08 to emphasize atmospheric perspective.

I started laying in the marker work with dark shading under the car for the shadow, using Copic N6, N7, & N8. The interior of the car is shaded with three dark reds. I shaded the body next with three shades of light gray – N0, N1, and N2.

The best part of using toned gray paper is the pop you can get from using whites. I used white charcoal pencil to bring out the white in the upper portions of the body, and the reflections.

White charcoal can be used simply like a regular pencil, but it really blends well with the grays when it’s smeared around with a paper towel.

The wheels were of particular challenge – the car sits on 60-spoke center-hub knock off wheels which are woven in two sets – a lower layer of ten sets of two spokes, and an outer layer of twenty sets of two spokes that converge toward the outside diameter. The twenty individual convergences are drawn at precisely 18 degrees of rotation each. It took some time to work out exactly which order to overlap each spoke.

The wheels were the final and most time-intensive part of the drawing. Once they were finished, the drawing was dusted off and framed in 18×14.

It’s a very cool car, and now this 1958 MGA drawing is off to its owner in Illinois!