What we’re going to be making:

Needed Files

Part 1 – Wheels

Let’s make the wheels more sporty by increasing their size. Open your car image into Paint Shop Pro and using the ellipse selection tool, select the front wheel. This might take a few tries, so don’t worry. It took me three times to get it in the center. I also have feature on 1, but you don’t need it.

Copy the wheel and paste it on a new layer. Increase the size (Shift+S) by 115 percent and click OK. Position it where the wheel belongs. You’ll notice part of the wheel overlaps the car body, and this should not happen. What I do is lower the opacity and delete the area overlapping. Might be a little confusing but it works.

Now make the back wheel bigger also. Copy it and paste it on the same layer as the other wheel, and without de-selecting, resize it. Fit it in place, you shouldn’t need to trim or cut any pieces of this one.

Now another thing I’m doing is selecting all the areas inside the spokes and using the dodge tool (Size: 33, Hardness: 0, Opacity: 30) and right-clicking to darken those areas.

Part 2 – The Windows

I also used the dodge tool (same settings) to darken the windows.

Part 3 – The Lights

Now select the lights and use the elipse selection tool to de-select just the light areas. What we want is just the black areas selected. Then use the dodge tool (same settings) and darken up the lights. It might take a few passes since the opacity is only 30, but this gives us more control of the final effect so we don’t go to darn (which would happen if you had it on 100 percent).

Now make a new layer and use the paint tool (Size: Varies, hardness: 50, color #47d1fb) and click once in head light to make them blue (Try to make the paint brush size the same size as the light). Set the blending options for the layer to color, and lower the opacity to 36.

Part 4 – The Trim

Select all the bottom trim and gray it out (Shift+L, Saturation: 0) and use the dodge tool (same settings) and make them darker with one pass of the brush.

Part 5 – Suspension

Make a selection like the following:

Now deselect the wheel wells. The reason I’m doing this separately is because it takes time, and if I mess up, I can undo it and get my previous selection back.

Now save your selection to the alpha channel and deselect the selection. This is am important step. Since the wheel is sticking out and overlapping the truck body, we gotta save the wheel. Merge the wheel and light layer with the truck layer (you should have one layer now). Select the wheel and copy it to a new layer. Move it where it belongs.

Now go back to the bottom layer, load your selection, and lower the truck a little.

You’ll notice we got a lot of things to clean up. Use a small black brush to fill in those nasty white areas, this helps a great deal. You’ll also have to trim some pieces on the right-hand-side of the front wheel (overlaps a part of the bumper on the bottom). And the right front wheel doesn’t match up. Just use the selection tool to trim that down and fill it in with white.

Conclusion

Using a few simple techniques, we were able to convert our awesome truck from stock to custom! It’s really easy, and fun. Let’s see what you can do, post a comment with your creation!