My friend Jimmi Widell (Jimpa/Hearse Driver on TRaK) from Sweden was telling me how he's just got his hands on a '63 Valiant hardtop model. And he's getting a 1:1 '63 Valiant 2-door soon. And that he's planning to build the model first then reproduce it in 1:1. He went on to say he was pretty open on what to do with it... And asked me if I had any ideas or renderings I could pass on!
*His only stipulations were: He doesn't want to chop or section it as that would have it off the road too long and he wants to keep it a driver...After that, just about anything was good!Well I didn't have a lot of ideas off the bat... As these Valiants are pretty restrained designs without a lot of obvious elements to grab onto and work with! They're really not the easiest car to come up with ideas for! And I've only seen the very few renderings of this car... And none I liked or thought worth passing on...
Now I hadn't done a drawing in over 5 years so this seemed like a perfect time to pull out my pencils and see what I could come up with! Figuring, if there were no renderings I was interested in, I'd just come up with my own!
This is the picture Jimpa sent me of the actual car he's getting:
So with that as my start, I searched around the net for some other angles to work from and came up with these...:
I originally numbered these next two drawing in order of preference. But in the end, I think I like #2 the best and may try to incorporate that design into a build of a '60s midsize... #4 is not really happening for me but I like the grill inserts a bit, they'd look cool cut out of aluminum sheet!
I like the drivers side front end treatment quite a bit on this one... I'd make those covers out of plexy, heated in the oven, pulled over a wooden buck! Spray them with a bit of candy blue or something, bullets...
(*I put dotted lines in on this one, to show where the sheet metal headed too!)
Could only find a 4 door in profile so I modified... Can't say I'm in love with how I drew the wheel wells in this sketch! They seem to be fighting the lines of the overall body a bit. The front one may work but not in combination with the one at the rear. But Just trying something out and offering up more options!
I like the idea of filling in the rear window here and giving it a Carson vibe... Maybe covered the roof in white vinyl or paint it pearl white...
The rear really only spoke to me in this one way. I think extendeing the rear fenders into fins really helps this thing along. And I like the idea of a full width taillight panel. I raised the wheel wells up too... Really lightens the car and up front, would facilitate driving at a lower stance. The front wheel well was squared up a bit too, Sloped to match the hood line at the top too... I think they're working nicely with the overall car in this sketch!...
Well that's my two cents on Jimpa's Valiant... Will have to see if any of it makes it into his builds!
Accueil 
