Truck: "The Cat Empire" tribute truck
Pod Name: CatEmpire.pod
Version: MTM2
Released: 22 February 2005


Well, going back over two years now the weekly social events on the Main MTM Message Board have included Desktop Day (take a screenshot of your desktop and post it), Sunday Funnies (posting comic strips & cartoons), and Song Of The Week music banter. Sometime last year, the idea of painting a truck in the theme of your featured band to go with your post became briefly popular, and this is the core of how this truck came about. Halfway through last year I'd picked up the album The Cat Empire by the Australian band of the same name and was immediately hooked on their upbeat, jazz-meets-urban sound. After SOTW trucks began appearing I started to feel that making a TCE-themed truck (putting the album art on a paintjob) was something I'd like to do.

I selected BigDOGGe's Ford F-150 Crewcab EVO conversion, and completely re-skinned it using the original EVO textures (green just wasn't my colour). But after I scanning in my album cover I baulked at trying to wrap it around a paintjob, and the project went back on the shelf for several more months. Then earlier this year, Cale announced he'd written a tutorial for truck painting with Paint Shop Pro 7, describing his tricks using layers and certain of PSP7's tools. I really did learn some new things from that - thanks Cale! - which inspired me to get back into it.

The album art looks like a roughly painted canvas, not quite covered right to the edges. I wanted to take this and wrap it around the truck over a white undercoat, not quite covering right to the edges of the body, to echo the album. This involved cutting and pasting parts of the artwork all over the truck textures, and much stretching, blending and filling in by hand to make everything join up. It wasn't easy (Cale's tips with layers helped a lot here), but the end result was great. I also grabbed some graphics from www.thecatempire.com for the 'sketchy' looking logo character on the wheels and rear window.

Once the paint was done the rest pretty much fell into place. The EVO textures seemed to include 'lights on' graphics, which I used for eight of the truck's 11 lights (the two-part taillights were a real pain...). I added a chassis by Slick, and shocks and transfer case by BigDOGGe, who also supplied me with the missing rear bumper when I asked (thanks!). The wheels are Cale's new ones, modified by me to be covered on the front so I could paint the logo on them.

The phrase on the tailgate reads "The Empire be rising..." and is a line from the song Two Shoes, the CHARIOT license plate is a reference to the anti-war song The Chariot. But probably my favourite touch is the mirrors, on which I painted little TCE logos!

This truck is dedicated to Winterkill!


Suggestions and comments welcome please.
You can e-mail me at d2smtm2@email.com
Check out my websites at http://mtm2.com/~d2s/
Visit The Cat Empire at http://www.thecatempire.com

That's about all... have fun with this!

---Drive2Survive
"Live for the Ride. Drive to Survive."