Have you ever owned a “normal” vehicle that had a special place in your heart? Most of the time, these vehicles are the ones that are the least valuable and the least exciting. It’s like going to the dog pound and rescuing the best dog you’ll ever own. Maybe it’s Grandpa’s old farm truck, Aunt Joan’s 4-door Valiant, or that beat-up Chevy Sprint that got you through college. Whatever it may be, these vehicles didn’t win your heart by their looks. They did it by providing you with experiences that stayed with you for the rest of your life.

When I get exiled from the living room, I either go out to the garage and tinker on the hot rods or grab something to read. On one particular night last week, the garage was too cold to paint the parts I was working on. I went back into the house to my mini-library of all of my car books and picked out one on Concept Cars. I had read this particular book many times before, but there’s one car in that book that has always intrigued the heck out of me. It’s the 1956 Chrysler Norseman.

There’s always the drive to take the subject that extra step… to get something to move in the image, to put it over the top. Some time back, I experimented with backgrounds in my renderings that included scanned and reworked splashes and splatters. They had that ‘frozen in time’ feel I was looking for, and allowed me to play with contrasting colors to get some visual pop and movement…