My name is Stuart, I'm thirty years old, married with two children and I live in Scotland. I have been a PlayStation guy for most of my life and I loved Gran Turismo. In 2009 we got our first Xbox 360 and it came with Forza Motorsport 2. I had already played Forza Motorsport, but not seriously. With Forza Motorsport 2 I struggled to make money easily so I started painting race replicas. I would make a Mclaren formula one livery and put it on the Mclaren F1, then sell it for a small profit.
Sometimes on the auction house I would see amazing fantasy liveries like Halo 3. I searched the Internet to try to find out how people could "import" images into the game! A few weeks later I bought a Ferrari 430 that had an unlocked Halo 3 livery on it, I was amazed when I took it into the Vinyl editor and saw how it was put together. I began copying video game box artwork we had, making a Resident Evil 5 logo. I was pleased with how good the "5" looked, so I wanted to try bigger and better.
For Forza Motorsport 3, I was ready. I Pre-ordered the limited edition and collected it at midnight launch. I can't recall what my first paint on Forza Motorsport 3 was, but my first "good" vinyl was Optimus Prime. The Vinyl looked good, but I struggled to make it look good on the car. My next project was an Alien vs Predator livery, again copying the game box we had. That looked a bit better and I learned techniques that I still use today.
Soon after I began to get noticed by community members wanting to trade vinyls, through vinyl trading I met Forensic2. He encouraged me to keep painting, he said that I was putting out good work and shouldn't be so harsh on myself about the flaws.
With Forza Motorsport 4 I was just as prepared as the last, this time I had lists of paints I wanted to make. However three months into the games release, on boxing day, I found that I had been banned for a week. This was shocking, all my vinyls and paints were deleted from my Storefront and I had no idea why. When it happened for the 3rd time, which was a month long ban, I went to the forums to find out why. Eventually a moderator told me I had been banned for selling a locked paint, stealing someone else's paints. I assured him that this wasn't true, but my words fell on deaf ears. When I got unbanned from my next three month ban I uploaded paints at 7pm. When I went back on at 12am, I discovered I had been banned for 20 years, I was distraught. It took me a long time to get over that.
That being said, there was never any doubt about getting Forza Motorsport 5. With Forza Motorsport 5 came more ambitious paints and streaming on twitch. My Batman Reventon was spotted by X-One Magazine soon after the game came out, they ran a feature that included my car and some of my painting tips. At first I would just paint on my streams but as I got near the end, when the Vinyl would look good, people would constantly ask me how I made these pieces. Rather than type out the same long message to people I thought about actually teaching people through twitch.
In one of my twitch streams I created my Batman Vs Superman Audi RS7. This was my first "next level" paint, It looked amazing. It even caught the eye of Ayo Jube, one of Turn 10's best painters. My increased presence on twitter and my new weekly painting tutorial just plunged me deeper into the community, and I met many of the awesome Forza people that I now know. Mesasphere, Aka_ffa, and many more.
PTG Stuzib85