I've been super-remiss on posting the in-progress paintings as I went along, but once it got to crunch time, I had to just paint as much as I could, whenever I could. You know how it is.

If Lambey was my favorite painting, this was my least favorite. I'm pleased with the way it came out in the end, but getting there was like pulling teeth.

For some reason, doing Samus was pretty easy - maybe because body armor is more forgiving to paint than a car? There were smaller bits? I'm not sure why, because I figured since they were both computer-generated colorful metallic surfaces I should be able to do a car pretty easily. But no. Maybe it was the extreme foreshortening, maybe it was the fact that Samus's armor was fragmented and Lighting has long stretches of shiny red, or that Samus is pretty un-charismatic and not only does Lightning scream "look at me!" every boy under the age of 7 knows everything about him already.

I think that once I started to add a little texture here and there - the tires, the end of the car, the lights - it started to come together. What matters is that Peter loves it, and that's the only part of it I really care about.

Mr. McQueen, are you ready for your closeup?