keep going with this !

New update:

BG seems off, either that or the right back wheel is levitating. Hehe. The back wheel seems smaller then the front. The front looks off, the cars right side should be smaller then the right, looks the other way now. The wall outside the airscope looks a bit thinn, and I am not sure about this paint... Some of the refs look a tad random, but I could be misstaken. And also the sideskirt looks a bit big. Only telling you this so that you can refine and make it better

I like the FB design, just need some perspective tweaks. The time attackish intake is nice there on the front, and it looks just evil! I think this has potential, but you need to put some serious time into it to refine it.

Cheers!

nice work so far mate. as mentioned, the first bg you used was way off angle, but the new floor isnt much better. makes it look like the front suspension on this side has collapsed . Try not to break the sky and floor apart, just find a bg with a mugh higher horizon, roughly a quarter of the way down the picture. The brushing is pretty good so far, but IMO no realistic background will suit it. Try and artistic one with abstract neons flying around etc. Like a toon bg, but more detailed. It looks promising though, keep it up but just be sure to take everything everyone's saying on board

i did this to show you the angle issues
best way to show what is going wrong is by fixing it
i hope your cool with that

i just did this superquick so ....
i rotated the car and part of the tarmac so it sits level with the bg ..
i heard you talking about trying to match the bg better to the car ..
in this case that would never really work out good , the bg is horizontal so the car needs to
come towards the bg

also i really downtoned the blues to match the mild bg better , and turned the sky into more a blue-ish sky
this was 4 minutes work and just look at the result , comes together way better right ??

now you can see the rear wheel is still of angle , i usually first give the car it's correct ride hight and then look at the angle of the car and new bg and then place new wheels

anyway it's all about angle / perspective and balance between car and bg (color wise and quality wise)
imo this bg looks cool now

hope you can use this , your skills are there it's just to need to invest time on angles and perspective's ..

before

after


btw you could use this surface so well for refs on the lower part of the skirt and fb corner
just make selections and use the clone tool and set the blending mode to whatever looks good good low opacity so it shows it's there but it's not standing out

bg wise you could do this > select the far side bg only , filter cut-out , set to soft light , lower the opacity so it looks almost realistic but still more towards toon/brush
then i overbrushed dark blue to the whole pic and set the blending mode different (play with the effect) and it's more whole (car and bg)
these things are only the tip of the iceberg what you can do to really make a car more realistic or blended together with the bg properly ..
i always spend tons of work on this , people dont see what you have done but it does make your chop btter in the end i believe , it just adds 40% extra
i mean a lot of perfectly brushed chops i've seen here could be made twice as cool with maybe 20 minutes of work


again i did not toutch your car one bit , only rotated it the right way , gave the bg a slight more toony look , gave the whole pic a blue colorfilter and this was not done properly but just superquick to show you the possibility's ..
i mean i know you want to get back up the ladder and thats why i did all this to show you it's not the actuall chop you need to worry about it's angle / perspective an maybe things like this (coloring) could help your chops also

If there was a reputation system on here, Rich, you would have to be on top! Awsome post!

Go Algeroth and Rich! Autemo loves you!
Both hit spot on what needs to be done.

yes, but someone should still help him with the shading etc.
looks totally off anyways, but atleast the angle is correct now

thats your task m8 , you help him with pointers on shading

i wont help him
lol