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"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
A few hints if you decide to paint the car yourself (and if you use GIMP):
For the blue-white gradient on the car you're trying to replicate, hold Ctrl when using the gradient tool to apply at a fixed angle.
The Fantrax logo on the quarter panels is in low resolution and at an angle of 1.5°.
For the best quality, use high resolution PNG images with transparent background and resize them
after rotating them (unless the angle is n*90°). Otherwise, the image will become blurry.
On a JPG file, I use Selective Gaussian Blur sometimes to cure compression artifacts.
Unsharp Mask may salvage a bad source image a little, too.
To get rid of a unicolor background, use Color to Alpha.
To change the color on a unicolor layer, e.g. the spoiler color or the helmet color, lock the Alpha Channel before applying Bucket Fill. Alternatively, use Hue-Saturation or Colorize.
Google for "nr2003 number sets" if you don't have a set of your own.
The final touches are the smaller sponsor logos on the B pillar and around the rear wheels. I use
magnetic guides fairly often, but the car isn't symmetrical around that area.
You can keep the clutter at a minimum if you organise everything in folders and merge or link the layers.
Before exporting to BMP/TGA, disable the mask and mesh layers.
From my experience, the NR2003 Carviewer prefers 24bit bmp. WinMip works alright with TGA. Avoid compression, except when saving the carfile.
WinMip requires MSVBVM50.DLL and MSCOMCTL.OCX in the folder its Exe is located. Under Win10, use Win7 compatibility mode.
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For creating more complex paintschemes, you'll probably have to use the Path tool and/or mess around with various brushes, effects and transparencies, but that's above my paygrade for the most part and it takes a while to learn. Those tools also have their glitches, so sometimes it may be a good idea to not bother at all.
Keep in mind that the #78 Furniture Row Racing machine used to be all black without any stylistic features for years. Just plain text and a car number.
A good rule is to give shapes borders that provide contrast and complement the colors they separate.
To save yourself some work,
Paint by RAH and other sites are a good place to start when looking for a base.
Occasionally, I use
Paletton to see what color combinations might work, but more often than not, it already is dictated by the sponsor.
The worst thing someone could do is to copy the track's asphalt/concrete texture and put it on the car.
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