"Artist on Wheels" - by Stuart Johnston

Docking in Cape Town in 1949, after eight long years of wartime austerity and post-war rationing, the 16 year-old boy from Sussex discovered colour. But the scenery attracting the young artist's eye was unrelated to picture postcard of jigsaw puzzles. While the rest of the passengers were oohing and aahing at the majesty of Table Mountain, Dave Adnams had eyes only for the car park.
"You can imagine what it was like coming from England, in post war England, all the cars were dark grey, dark blue and black. And here, ah, it was like heaven.

I saw Buicks sparkling with all the chrome, yellows, reds, Hudsons, Studebakers, Convertibles, white sidewalls. I'm a great 1950s American fan; it's such a pity that today you only find white sidewalls on minibus taxis."

The war wrecked a lot of English kids' formal education and Dave was one of those who had to leave school at the age of 14 and take whatever work he could find. He was an errand boy for an undertaker, but every spare moment he had, he was drawing cars, hoping to become a designer.

His father was an advertising artist and moved to this country with CNA to head its art department and soon after Dave arrived in Jo'burg, he joined his dad in the Commissioner Street studio as a junior. The experience was good, the wages lousy and it wasn't long before Adnams junior wanted to spread his wings.
"I moved across the street and got a job as a trainee airbrush artist, which was still a pretty rare technique in those days". Dave worked hard at his new craft ands soon he was with the major agency Lindsay Smithers, where he was the agency's first retoucher.

Cars were coming into Dave's professional life as he worked on the accounts of firms like Stanley Motors, airbrushing those fabulous brochures of the 1950s and early '60s, laying on colour and images of Hillmans, Peugeots and Austins.

A move to Van Zyl & Schoneveld saw him photograph and draw the famous Sasol poster series of the 1960s, featuring line and wash renderings of the Lotus Cortina, the Ford Mustang, the Mercedes 230 SL and the Porsche 904 amongst others. Dave had to take his own shots at Kyalami because the material he needed didn't exist in this country.

For the past 18 years Adnams has been working for himself and today he specialises in personalised airbrushed paintings of cars for collectors, and for company boardrooms.
From Hispano Suizas to Ferrari F40s, Dave's blend of minute attention to detail with a tangible feeling for his subject makes the works that are found on walls all over the country unique.

The process of creating an Adnams collectible is painstaking, time consuming and intense. "I need to get the feel of a car. Ideally I like to drive it, spend time with it, photograph it from all angles. I need to know where the engine is, where the gearbox is located, how the windows work, the feel of the seats. I guess it's the same for any other artist. A chap who paints elephants needs to know his subject, how the weight is distributed, where the energy of the subject lies".

Dave sets about things by taking the chosen photograph and blowing it up on his epidiascope. He then carefully draws it up on tracing paper, paying careful attention to the ellipses that make up so many of the shapes. For this he uses a set of plastic ellipses numbering close to 200 in total, ranging in different sizes and from angles of 10 to 80 degrees. Lights, bumpers, shadows, radiator grilles are all created using these ellipses.
The next step is to do a rub-down tracing, by rubbing on a second tracing with a 5B (soft) pencil and step three is to draw that out in hard line on a third tracing using a 6H pencil for precision. The final drawing is now complete and the process of adding colour begins. Adnams starts by precisely masking out the car and painting in the background, which is usually decided upon after discussion with the client.
"Boardroom works usually have a plain background, while many enthusiasts want something personal, say a typical South African setting. I do the background first because this helps me to get the correct feel for the colour of the car, the car has to fit the background."

Look at a painting, or a photograph of a car for that matter, and you'll probably make the novice's mistake of assuming the car to be monochrome. But look carefully and the red becomes a subtle montage of pinks, whites, blues, all subtly blended according to the way the light fell on the subject when it was imaged.
To achieve these subtle shade changes takes an extraordinarily sensitive eye, a maestro's touch with an airbrush trigger and an earthbound determination to create the series of frisket masks used to separate light from shade. These are made of transparent film and are taped down on one side to secure them and then flipped up at the leading edge as the artist works in the airbrush to get subtle graduations of shade rather than harsh lines.

There are other techniques that Dave uses. The wheels, for instance, are initially drawn in as complete ellipses, and he creates the flattering effect of the tyres, caused by the car's mass, by working in shadow, until the effect is just right.

"If I work flat out, seven to eight hours a day, a large wall-size piece would take seven to eight days.
But it's better to work a bit, stand back from it, canvass opinions of friends, because otherwise you can get lost and fail to see a basic mistake you are making."

When you buy an Adnams piece you are buying over four decades' experience in car art, from a man who loves his work, loves cars with character.

"You have to do what you know. If I were to try and break into computer graphics now I would be competing in a field where so many people are ahead of me in the queue. And for me, as much as I admire the new system, they still lack that feeling that is so essential."