I’m completely new to all of this so please forgive my ignorance.
I’ve recently stumbled across more and more people creating cartoon caricature images from motorsports, whether it be F1 or MotoGP. I take a lot of photographs myself and would love to create these caricature type images for myself, the problem is, is that I don’t have a clue where to start.
I believe that the original image has been turned into a Vector file, and then manipulated from there.
Does anyone know the stages of editing that might take place? How is the ‘cartoon’ effect created? How are different parts of the image exaggerated such as the head and the wheels?
This is the look I’m going for, I’d be working from my own JPEG image:
It looks like the motorcycle (sans the wheels/tires) and the cyclist body (sans the head/helmet) are pretty much a 1:1 reproduction of the photo. So the wheels/tires and head/helmet are exaggerated.
My thought is that someone placed the photo in Illustrator (or some other drawing program), used the photo as a template, and drew the caricature over the template. If the drawing is planned correctly, it’s not too tough create the head/helmet, for example, as a separate element that can be scaled independently of the rest of the illustration to give you the exaggerated effect.
I could be wrong, but I really don’t think autotrace was used for any of this. Certainly not the disc rotors where there is no blur shown in the caricature.
I would say whoever did this had some skill, so I don’t think you are going to find an easy “push this button” type of workflow.
All of that said, there are folks around here who are more talented illustrators than I, so maybe someone else can shed more light.
Maybe pieces of it were done that way, but autotracing produces a nearly impossible mess to work with. As @Steve_O mentioned, the guy on the bike and the bike different sizes from the original. My guess is that it was traced by hand with the pen tool, but there are several ways it could have been done.
