So as you’ve probably read I’m constantly back and forth as to the color direction of where I want Project Żuczek to head in.
My original plans reached back to 2017 when I acquired the now absent Yellow as the source of my project dreams and was trying to recreate a version of my mother’s Beetle that I spent my formative years riding in.
I am constantly torn between the purple/gray pallet that I’ve been exploring (due to my minor life-long fetish with the Transformers character known as Shockwave) and then my more pearl/metallic orange/tangerine-look homage to my mother’s Brilliant Orange 74.
Over the past two years it has been back and forth on color, and through that time I’ve been trying to document colors I’ve seen out in the wild, as well as collect images of cars that fall into the different purple/gray/orange hues that would work for me. (The dozens of takes on Shockwave since 1984 have resulted in a variety of lighter and darker version, but all still more or less in some kind of purple and gray.
Well in the closing moments of televised coverage of yesterday’s final day of the Barrett-Jackson Las Vegas a car rolled across the block that truly captures the purple/gray that I’ve been leaning towards and given the cars incredibly curvy nature, helps to mimic the way the colors would work on a Beetle’s shape.
Meant to evoke the Art Deco influences in the cars of the late 20s and 30s, this 1988 Santarsiero Atlantis Roadster is the first car I’ve come across that really captures the paint colors I really am leaning towards.
It is a stunning retro car with an amazing paint job.
Grays in Żuczek would be done in either a gray paint, of evoked by using textured stainless steel/brushed aluminum.
I love the way the color flops as the light hits the curves with the accents of the grays here and there adding to a particular shape.
The thing with purples is that there are so many ranges of blues with magentas in them. This one definitely shifts towards the deeper dark purples much like the original Shockwave toy did. And this is the first car that I think I’ve come across with this exterior color pallet matching rather closely to what has been in my mind.
I would still probably go with a metallic or pearl, and maybe even see what a satin gray would look like against that.
The more I come back to this color pallet, the more I realize that this is what the final colors probably will look like.
Of course, then I see a car done in just the right metallic orange and I’m back to that as a possibility.
I have a lot of time to decide but damn, it is so nice to finally have a car with some curves done up in the colors I’ve had in my head.
While the Atlantis Roadster engine bay still uses some chrome, that would always be a minimal things on my car to be avoided in lieu of stainless steel or brushed aluminum. And of those are not options than to paint in gray.
I just think it will be fabulous for a German Look-ish Beetle.
Shockwave’s orange “eye” would bring in the 3rd color, and be used very infrequently and only as a minor accent.
And yes, I stupidly want to make a custom windscreen sun protector in black with just a huge orange eye in it that would bring the whole thing and make it obvious what the inspiration is from.
Here’s a video I found of the car from a prior sale. You can really see how the colors look in the sunlight.