The inspiration of this was a super documentary on music conductor Herbert Von Karajan (called Karajan: or Beauty As I See It) and I wondered if I could spell something racing-related out with musical notes. C, D, E, F, G, A, and B are the letters available and I couldn’t readily think of one. Then I remembered the rest notation and realised that if I called that an R, I could make the word ‘racecar’ in musical notes. As a bonus, it is a palindrome and so should mirror to the other side with little work.
The stave was pretty straight forward to start with. I placed the notes and, after failing to create the fancy rest symbol (crotchet rest), I went for the easy route and used the breve and semibreve rests which are small blocks. This redefined the size of my stave because the minimum size of a square primitive in FCTP is rather chunky. So I made my stave and note heads bigger and ran into a significant problem. The minimum size of a square primitive in FCTP is rather chunky. Meaning that I couldn’t produce the stems for each of the notes.
I solved this by breaking the stave. I’d already considered the inability to produce a thin line by placing four long white primitives on a black background creating the impression that I had produced thin black lines. I now needed to pull a similar trick to produce the stems of each note. So, the first white space of the stave was broken above the two A notes; the first white space is made up of three white primitives. The second is broken in four above the A’s and below the E. The third is broken into four below the C’s and the E. The fourth is broken into three below the C’s.
Needless to say, this was a bit fiddly. When I mirrored the design I made it even more fiddly for myself by moving all the white spaces instead of just moving the note heads but by the time I realised how stupid I was, I had to finish what I started and it didn’t take too long anyway. While it doesn’t look terribly neat on the side-on screenshot above, looking at it in the angled views and replays gives a much better impression.
The F50 supplies the problem of disguising, ignoring or using a thick black line that goes from the front of the car to the back along the side. I disguised it by making the car essentially two-tone red and black.
My racing logo, dynamic number 4, chequered flag motif and blank stave were added to round out the livery. The blank stave also wraps around the front. The chequered flag wraps around the rear.
In motion, this strong colour scheme works brilliantly and this livery looks fantastic. Even without knowing that the notes spell ‘racecar’, this livery looks fabulous in replays and, for me, the knowledge of that little detail is very pleasing.
Screened by Slimm 