Planning Process for each model?

I know that "prep" is the most important when painting modes/cars so I was curious how much planning do you do before your prep. Do you guys draw our designs of how you want the car to look or is it more of a visualization on how you want it to look? I was thinking of starting to draw out how I wanted the car to look to make sure I got it exactly how I wanted to even though I'm not the greatest drawer, but for xmas I received a book on "how to draw cars like a pro"! hehe. How much do you models plan before you even start opening the car?

i know alot of people do draw out what there gonna do but personally i just go with the flow, sometimes i look a pics of other models that i like the design and take little thing here and there from real life pics so i can make a design in my head and go work, and it works for me:frog: :frog:

I typically use some sort of design I've seen in magazines..... Or i take pics of the car (1:1) that im modeling.

Sketching things out is a great way to start, sometimes putting things on paper will help you work things out that you may not have realized when visualizing it..

Remember that sketches don't have to make sense to anybody but you... making them look pretty is a waste of time, just draw enough to figure things out.. it makes no difference how it looks..

I find reference pictures, then go for it.

Hey, I got that book too! :D

most of the time i look at magazines like super street and import tuner when ever im doing an ITR, if its not an itr i try to find a pic of the car on the internet, i never draw cars cause i suck at it,:(

i usually dont do much in planning a model cuz i live life one day at a time:finger:

What I like to do, is find/scan 'blueprints' of the car I'm working on (the painting guide from the back of the instructions works fine), then print them in 1/24 scale, and just draw on all the detail I plan to add/change.

Sometimes I'll use Photoshop to see how a paint scheme would look. When doing the Hayabusa, I couldn't decide if I wanted gold/green or green/gold, doing both in Photoshop helped me decide. Again, it doesn't have to be pretty, as long as you understand it :D

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/kaiyao1/hayabusa1.jpg

I am still in the planning stage of my Testarossa, after abt 1 month. I am very dissatisfied with the size of the wheel wells and the cramped engine bay due to the orientation of the engine. So i started scratchbuilding a monocoque chassis yesterday. Still not yet finished, so many parts to go. The most difficult would be to fix the wheels in position. But this chassis would be curbside, cause i don't have a spare engine to put in the Rossa. Scratchbuilding the chassis, of course i used my own handrawn blueprint, scanned it in, then made copies of it to cut the abs sheets that i am using.;)

I usually search the web for the type of car it is and find one that I really like and go after that. Or find a couple cars and get ideas off of each of them. With my latest ITR I got ideas from about 5 different cars and was constantly changing it as I went along. It's different for every car with me, I never know what's gonna happen. :D

I just go with the flow of whatever comes to mind!:bandit: Sometimes I write out what I want to do to each model but that's too much like work so it doesn't happen that often :o

I haven't modified many of the cars I have built so can't really comment fully. On the Celica I am doing now it is basiclly play it by ear (or eye) approach.

I knew what color I wanted to use, then saw flyonthewall's transkit for the Celica and said thats what I want.

Then painted it and test fitted the body, the wheels (according to 99.9% of the people that saw it) were too small and made the car look too high. So I test fitted other wheels till it looked (in my opinion) "RIGHT"

Before I even buy my model kit I will plan the colours to use for exterior, interior & other things like that. Then I will try to find pictures of that model as a real car and see if it looks good. But for some I use a proper colour chart from the manufacturer of the car to get a real effect. Like with my Plymouth Superbird.