Tearing up the Track by Half-dude on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

"I once ran the Indy 500 I must confess I'm impressed how I did And I wonder how close that I came Now I get a sinking sensation I was the top of the line, out of sight out of mind So much for fortune and fame"

-------(Character's Song)------------------------------------
Tom Petty - Learning To Fly: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMDjMK…
I like this one best because it's got an uplifting bitter-sweetness to it, and it has the Indie Car or Andy as I've named him, describing his life but keeping an uplifting tone throughout. "It started out down a dirty road-" describing his early beginnings before the Indy, practice solo racing on the unpaved roads of his home town people in town loving to watch him. "Those good ol' days may not return-" When he moves into the big-time but somewhat missing his humble roots. "some say life will beat you down- steal your crown-" his reaction to wrecking at the Indy, feeling robed of his victory by fate's hand. "I've started out for god knows were, guess I'll know when I get there" his thoughts as he was being unknowingly shipped to Ernie's (or it's 20's ancestor-self). The chorus then turns to saying 'fly around the clouds' rather then' fly, but I ain't got wings.' This maybe hinting at after his 'crushing' and now he's a little car angel. (aww ) and "what goes up must come down" can mean his success in life raising and falling or even the mashing of the crusher's press raising and falling.

Here is the character I've gotten the most requests from people to do, the Indy 500 race car. Not only was this one probably one of the most detailed drawings I've done so far for the Ernie's series.. but it was also the most grueling to research! I swear, there is hardly any good consistent information online regarding this era of racing. I've spent a lot of time and effort gathering my facts and I hope you all find at least some of it interesting. :] If you're interested in the character at all I'm sure you'll enjoy learning about the details of all this.

Here is some actual rare 1919-1920 footage from the oldie time Indy races! This is really awesome to watch and it really gets you into the atmosphere of what it was like back then: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK-CYa… (skip to 2:30 in)
RL photo of the Indy 500 track back in 1913: fc02.deviantart.net/fs71/f/201…

This picture is a bit unique compared to my others, in the sense of the circumstances shown. Unlike the others who merely show a random scene from the character's years of prime life. I thought I'd really take advantage of the Racer's unique life compared to the others and have this picture both show the character in his prime.. but also only moments before the tragic accident that ends his career and leaves him totaled. Anyone who's watched races or even normal automobile accidents know how an accident can happen just like that in an instant.. especially in a 100MPH race.

I've left Andy's place in the race vague, as even the character himself can't recall 'how close he came.' But by the looks of it he was doing quite well when it all fell apart. During the first turn on lap 42 the racer next to our hero, #2 looses a tire and after a few futile moments of trying to regain control inevitably drifts in to Andy's left side causing them both to slide off the track in a multi-roll over crash (ejecting 3 of his tires in the process).

While I doubt I'll draw many future pictures of Andy since racing isn't my strong-suit I'm planning to draw at least one more small picture later one.. on that one I'll go into more detail of Andy's driver, French-American Anton Toupin, as well as details of how the two of them got all the way to the Indy 500 race.

----(Drawing Comments)--------------

Like I stated above, this one took a LOT of research. I didn't even have the privilege of simply researching racing (which I know nothing about practically) of today because most of it didn't apply all the way back in the 20s and 30s! First off was the Indy 500 race track, which of course looked different back then. -.-; This is where photographic reference came in very handy! Only later after I drew the background did I notice.. 'oh crap, it's B/W I have no idea of the colors! So I kinda had to guess.. I tried to make the track as accurate as possible even down the placement of trees. I had to cheat and add the "Pagota" control tower www.indianapolismotorspeedway.… closer to the track then it really is.. but it's such a landmark of the Indy track that I couldn't leave it out!

A VERY interesting tidbit here is the fact that I actually had to horizontally flip this drawing before I colored it. You see, I had the drawing in mind orientated like this: img20.imageshack.us/img20/1219… and couldn't make myself draw it any other orientation! The problem though is that'd have the cars racing the track in the wrong direction..so I drew out the line-art.. make the numbers backwards and all so that after scanning it I could horizontally flip it and make the orientation correct. XD It's amazing how different the picture looks though just from being flipped though!

----(Information, History, and Interesting stuff)-------------

For those who don't know:

The Indy 500 is an 500 mile US race track located the state of Indianapolis, it's a simple circular course. It's one of the top 3 most famous races worldwide.

There's a bit of a disagreement over exactly what model this character is supposed to be, like many of the cars of Worthless, he's mostly a generic design. I've seen it speculated that he could be a Bugatti Type 35 www.bugattipage.com/newspics2/… but these were very rare cars, only 400 were ever made. But personally I believe Andy is actually a 1920s model Duesenberg Racer www.sportscardigest.com/wp-con… as the character himself has a fairly large square-ish grille where as the Bugatti has a small oval-shaped grille.

Duesenberg automobiles, created by German brothers Friedrich and August Duesenberg, were some of the best cars at the time and dominated the Indy 500 in the mid 1920s but began their decline in success in the 30s on the unset of the Great Depression. From the sound of the character in the movie, his model was in the prime when he was racing, so I believe he is a 1920s model during the company's prime.

I have to admit, until I researched into this character I had no idea he was so old! Personally I didn't even think they had auto-races in the 20s. I thought he was just a 50s-70s formula car.. boy was I wrong! I try not to add a lot of extra details to the characters, but in this case I couldn't help but add a little extra detail to Andy including the leaf-spring suspension over his front tires there and other little details. I guess you could assume that before he appeared in the movie someone had salvaged his suspension for another of his models in some museum or something. : (

Personally the idea that anyone would scrap a 20s/30s era Duesenberg OR Bugatti is pretty tragic. Those cars were made in limited numbers, they were made custom built by hand. Worthless seems to like pissing car people off come to think about it since almost EVERY car in that song is a valuable collectors car these days. >O; Heck Bobby Lee would go for about 98,000andPinkyforabout98,000 and Pinky for about 98,000andPinkyforabout20,000.