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I have a suggestion.  Back when I visited these forums regularly, the way the animation and color comps sometimes worked is that no one would post an entry for weeks on end.  At that point, the person who started the contest would post a complaint about the lack of entries, then the comp would either continue to drift on until it was given a mercy kill, or someone would post an entry out of pity.  That would result in an exchange somewhat like the following:

+Hey, I posted something.  Does that mean I won?
-You're the only one, so I guess.  Yeah, sure.
+Can I just start a new contest, or do I have to ask someone's permission, or what?
-No, you can just start it.
+Cool.

So my thought is, why not make the pity post an official part of the rules?  If a comp goes inactive (i.e. there are no entries for at least a week after the deadline) then the first person to post an entry automatically wins by default and can immediately start a new comp.  Making it part of the rules will eliminate confusion and those time-wasting 'Did I win?' 'Yeah, I guess' posts and hopefully give people incentive to create an entry, even if the deadline has long since passed.

I find a picture of a car from the right angle on Google Images.  Then I scale down the image so it fits in the background, and save that version of the picture.  After that, I usually trace over the outline of the smaller image, and use the bigger image as a reference for the highlights/shadows/etc.

Some people would consider tracing over a scaled-down image "cheating," but I prefer the precision of that method.