The talented creators of the Auto Artisan Group, Directors MICHAEL PALLADINO and BORA BRIGHT, take us through one of their many awesome car wrap transformations. This month a Mercedes AMG GTS gets the special treatment…
COLLABORATION PROJECT
THE CAR: Mercedes AMG GTS
THE GOAL: To create a custom designed, worn and torn race livery sponsored by Auto Artisan
THE INSPIRATION
The inspiration for this project came from personal passion towards race liveries, but
not the usual ones you’d expect to see. At Auto Artisan we love old, dirty and torn up wrap designs. We’ve designed so many wraps on other customers’ cars and they all looked outstanding. It was time for us to create one for ourselves. The design which caught our eye at first sight is the one from the original creators Esselegi, with their custom AMG GT3 race livery. We took this design as our inspiration but we aimed to make a lot of changes.
PREVIOUS DESIGNS
We have created a few different rustic, tattered, torn and tracked designs in the past, like the work we have done on a few McLarens. Some of these designs were in conjunction with Bullrush Rally attendees to make sure their rides really stood out from the crowd of 50 other supercars.
THE CREATIVE
Many of the details came from the Esselegi design as we mentioned earlier. However, we made some simple, but obvious colour changes and utilised Auto Artisan colours. The largest part of this project was hand brushing all of the small details like the dirt, splatters, tyre marks and more. All up our designer spent about six hours for the hand drawn detail. It was very intricate – we needed to locate then align the vents, grills and edges of the wheel arches perfectly. If we missed these by a few millimetres the dust and dirt could have “clean sections” and the look would tie all together. We added our Auto Artisan logos as a background layer but of course, these were faded and blended in with the dirty look as well.
PRINT PROOFS
When it comes to printing anything in “high quality” we like to use our solvent printer. The blacks tend to be richer – it picks up colours so much better than our workhorse, the latex printer. This was different because it was an old and worn design. Which meant the latex was absolutely perfect. It has a lot of advantages too, the best one being the ability to print and laminate immediately, we don’t have to wait for it to air out the solvents in the inks.
TEST FITMENTS
After the initial lot of prints, we had to put them to the test. This had to fit right about perfect – it is vinyl, so we have some wiggle room to stretch the material but it’s always better to have a planned installation with accurate results. Even if it means we have to waste some material and time to test fit it. Like they say – measure twice, cut once.
INSTALLATION
As we got moving on the installation process, the main parts of the car were laid first – starting with the entire one side as a single layer print. This laid our foundation for alignment to the rest of the car. After all, we were confident because our test installation went very well. Bit by bit, as the installation was progressing, there were small touches we added. You can’t miss the most obvious one, the yellow headlight tints. Even more, we didn’t want to black out all of the chrome, so we took a different path. We actually tinted the badges all around using tint film. This worked really well, because when you use gloss black, it hides a lot detail, this way, we kept every bit of detail of the AMG badge on the bonnet.
This AMG GTS has a lot of aftermarket aero parts installed, but it felt like something was needed to top it all off. We had seen these awesome bonnets on the race cars being re-manufactured with glass panels to show off the engine bay. This was it – we had to get one on this car. So, we took the car and bonnet to our friends at Exclusive Group to install it. With this final piece in place, everything was completed and it was time for us to put the car back together. The finished product looks awesome. Check it out. ■
THE FINISHED PRODUCT
For the full article grab the April 2021 issue of MAXIM Australia from newsagents and convenience locations. Subscribe here.
