I paint a lot of old vehicles. Not the showroom kind, mostly. The kind with a bit of age on the paintwork, where the colour has gone soft and uneven and the chrome has stopped being a mirror.
Old paint is a good subject for pastel for a plain reason: it is never one colour. A green truck is green, and also grey where the light is flat, and warm cream where the sun sits on the top edge, and a dozen other things in the reflections. Pastel lets you lay all of those down side by side.
Here are four of them.
Classic Charm
A pickup in that particular olive-sage that only ever looked right on a working truck, cream across the roof, wooden rails standing up out of the bed. The background is deliberately unresolved, mottled cream and green and a little orange, so the truck sits forward and nothing competes with it.
The grille is the part that took the care. All those vertical bars, and the trick is that you cannot paint every one or it goes mechanical. You paint some and let the eye supply the rest.
Caddy
Chrome, mostly. A Cadillac front end taken close enough that the car becomes shapes rather than a vehicle, with the bumper bullets and the heavy grille bar and all that pale lavender and grey running through the metal.
Chrome is not silver. It is whatever is standing in front of it, slightly distorted and a little cooler. Paint it silver and it dies. Paint it as reflections and it comes alive.
Vintage Velocity
This one is less polite than the others. A deep red pickup on flat grey, with splatter and drips thrown around and under it in red and black, so the truck looks like it arrived at speed and the picture has not settled yet.
It is the only one of the four where the background is doing as much as the subject. Available as a fine art print.
Red Oldie
A red truck head-on with a yellow plate on the bumper and sunflowers coming up behind it, and the red and the yellow doing the thing that red and yellow do when you put them together and do not apologise for it.
Available as a fine art print.
There is one more vehicle I have not shown you, and it is the best of them. I will put it up later this month.
The rest of the collection is in the gallery. If you have a car of your own in mind, commissions are open.
— DawnE