PTG Magazine Issue 3 - January 2016 | Page 9

As PTG give a huge warm welcome to our newest painter PTG Fox, Elliot managed to find the time in his busy schedule to give us all a little background about himself. Hello there my name is Eliot 39 from Brooklands in Surrey and I am a total Forza head. Like so many of my age and generation I fell in love with driving games through Gran Turismo, then one day I was round a friends house who had recently bought an xbox and we played Halo 2 and Forza motorsport all night long suddenly my allegiance was switched, the next day I traded my ps2 and got myself an xbox with Forza motorsport and a subscription to xbox live, I hung out with a bunch of people and played everyday for many many hours, I played the **** out of that game, we had a system where we would only be allowed stock cars (everyone had to have the same car) no tunes the winner picked the car and second picked the track. I ended up with a two in three podium ratio and a hot lap rank of 500. With the release of Forza Motorsport 2 suddenly everything had changed and it was completely a different game, my circle of friends and our race meets were gone (due to the fact the stock cars were horrendous) knowing nothing of tuning my online race profile took a massive down turn, suddenly I found my self with only single player mode to content myself with, unfortunately that trend continued until fm5, in fm2 I tried to dabble with the paint brush and made a fairly convincing replica of the Nevermind album cover and Rancids Out come the wolves album cover, but then my other creative outlets started to take preference, I was in a band and we got signed, recording, gigging, rehearsals and my career in catering dented my gaming time, although single player was completed I didn’t do much else with forza 3 or 4 which in retrospect was a great shame. Soon though my band and musical career fell apart about the time of horizon was released, having played Test Drive Unlimited the prospect of an open world racer had a negative affect on me and I gave it a wide birth (still the only forza title I haven’t played) In February 2013 I hooked up with my childhood sweetheart, I quit my job and moved in with her and her 6 children (yes 6, no I don’t know what I was thinking) for my birthday that year she gave me a day one xbox one with forza 5, with money being fairly tight I only really had fm5 to play, after completeing the entire game I wanted more so I started playing around in the paint booth again, my early paints were primitive cartoon paints of the animated series Archer, seeing what other people were doing I decided to let forza take the full force of my creative needs, and go for bigger more complex paints, after searching fm.net forums I discovered a grid system that I made work for me, my first paint after the Archer paints was a prince portrait (I’m a huge prince fan) and it looked really good and I thought wow I can really do this, next up was a portrait of the Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, the overall paint was fairly awful but there was something about his eyes that once again gave me belief in my abilities to paint, next up was a prodigy Music for the jilted generation and Wilfred paint. So came along Horizon 2, like horizon one I wasn’t all that concerned about the game itself but I really wanted to continue with this painting malarkey, after a month or two of some ok paints nothing spectacular I found a post on the fm.net forums about a paint tutorial twitch stream, eager to learn more about my new found passion I stopped in on this stream and found a whole new world. Stuzib85 was the host and my eyes were opened, after watching for two or three weeks in a row I tentatively started to talk to Stu on his stream and through twitter asking for advice and tips on paints I had already attempted (this is where I class my pa [