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2. The Base Layer

As the name already suggests, the base layer is the most important one. Making a mistake on this layer might mess up the whole vector in the end and that’s why I always put a lot of work into this one layer.

But let’s get started. The first thing we have to do is to outline the different sections by using either the line tool (which I prefer to use) or the pen tool. Now outlining is basically about separating different parts from each other and inside these parts it’s about separating changing colors from each other.
I started with the outside of the rim and the dark parts between the ‘turbines’ and then made the turbines and the middle part of the rim.
So, start outlining the first part of the rim like this:

There’re a lot of color changes in these parts and since I’m going to color them with gradients, I separate them again. You don’t really need to do this, because you can assign up to 8 colors (in Flash 8) to the gradient, but it takes a lot of adjustment to get the spaces between the different colors right. This messed things up for me, so I decided to make gradients with not more than two colors in them.
With this in mind, my separation looks like this:

At this point you have two options: You either continue making outlines and separating the colors from each other or you go straight to coloring what you have right now.
I always do the latter, but there’s no real reason to this or anything. I just like it better that way.
My coloring process ‘works’ as follows:
First thing I do is clearing all color swatches from the color panel to keep things a bit more organized and because I don’t need any of these colors anyway.
Then I look for a starting point to start picking up the colors from the reference. I lock the base layer, unlock the reference layer and grab the eye dropper tool to pick the first two colors for my first gradient like this:

The colors should now appear in the color swatches panel. From there I turn to the color mixer panel to put together the gradient. Since the colors in this case go straight from one to another, I chose a linear gradient:

I don’t need to adjust anything of this gradient since I choose to separate the different ‘gradients’ of the reference manually. Now I grab the paint bucket tool and fill the appropriate shape.

Right now, the gradient goes into the wrong direction and the spread of color is not exactly what I aimed at. To change this, I need the gradient transform tool. I guess I don’t need to explain what the tool does, because the name sums it up already. When you click on a gradient you just applied, you’ll see two blue lines and – as long as it’s a linear gradient – two handles. The circle circulates the gradient and the square in- or decreases its size.

All you have to do now is to transform the gradient to your liking. I rotated it, placed the pivot point in the center of the shape and adjusted the spread of the gradient till the blue lines of the tool somewhat match the outlines of my separation: The latter takes a bit of estimation, though, because in 90% of all cases you can’t make them match exactly. To get a good outcome, check back on the reference and see how the colors are spread there.

Now the rest needs to be colored. From this point on, I only need to pick one color for each new gradient, because the next gradient will start with the color the last one ended with. Saying this, you might want to treat the color swatches panel carefully i.e. don’t safe any unnecessary swatches in there, because you need to keep track of which color you used last time.
Set up your gradient again and fill the shape with it. When you’re finished, delete the outlines and continue to make new ones and so on. Every now and then you probably should check the outcome of what you’ve done so far, just to see if something went wrong.

Depending on how the light hits the surface you have to apply radial gradients. The way you can handle them is the same like how you’d handle linear gradients…use the gradient transformation tool for it.

When you’re finished with the layer, you should have something like this:

In case you have problems with placing your outlines, here’s a reference of mine:

One last thing, though. As you can see the centre part of the rim has the Mercedes Benz emblem on it and some text, too. You got two options to handle the text: You can either type the text manually, brake it apart (Modify – Break Apart or Ctrl + B), align it with the text of the reference and last but not least apply gradients or solid fills to every single letter, or you can either simply outline it i.e. treating it like any other part of this piece. I prefer the latter. It may be a bit more work to outline this tiny letters, but at least I can be sure that the outcome will come really close to the original. It’s not always the case that I have the right font for a case like this or it would take too much reshaping anyway.
However, this is totally up to you. I know some people who like to type the text and everything and they usually get a nice result from this, but everyone told me that it takes a lot more practice to get things right that way.

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