The cutaway is an excellent tool for an automaker to show off the sweet technical guts of its latest car. They’re also great educational tools to help young gearheads and aviators learn how their vehicles and engines work. But how do you think about how these cutaways are made? Sure, some are just photos of an actual vehicle chopped apart, but what about rendered images?
This morning, Jason showed us the glorious cutaway images put out by General Motors in the 1980s. I mean, the GMC S-15 is such a simple truck, yet GM gave it an incredible cutaway image.
Reader Pneumatic Tool gives us stunning details on how these images are made:
I’m (primarily) a graphic artist by trade and was in college during the late 80’s/early 90’s. These kind of drawings always fascinated me, so I paid close attention to the breakdowns of how these things are/were done as I learned various illustration techniques. When I was in school, the first shots of the digital revolution were being fired…these cutaways were created well before that. With the exception of the Toronado (photo composite), these were hand rendered. That doesn’t mean that they were *hand drawn*…it’s likely that the isometrics were drawn in CAD and handed over to the artist who traced them on his board. That’s how it was done…if a drawing looked too good to be true, it was traced, and yes you can transfer a tracing from a photo or print onto an opaque illustration board by hand – I did it many times (just a matter of learning the tricks).
Now the real fun begins. What I’m seeing here is a frenzy of mixed media; gouache (opaque watercolor), markers, technical pens, airbrush, colored pencils, you name it. Orchestrating all of that is where the the artist shines. Using an airbrush for illustration involves putting a sheet of transparent material (frisket film) over a drawing that has been broken down like a paint-by-numbers project (shapes represent different colors or shades), then you take a x-acto knife and veeeery carefully cut out all of those shapes. Using some kind of photo reference (or your mind) you lift off these shapes one by one and color each area individually, adding gradient within each. When you’re done with that area, you carefully replace the frisket, rinse your airbrush, and start the next one. The problem is that by working like this (lift off, replace, lift off another, replace), you have no idea what the overall illustration actually looks like as your working – fun! Basically, you have to imagine what the right thing is and work towards what is in your mind. You only know if you’re right when you lift all the frisket off. If it worked, you’re golden…if not, either start over or try to fix it at the peril of making it worse.
Once you’re done with the airbrushing, you go back in and kick up the areas that need it – adding pure white highlights with whiteout, details with colored pencils, maybe some solid water colors, technical pens, straight watercolor, graphite, etc.
Ultimately, these people did a lot of work to create illustrations like this in the pre digital age. Honestly, there’s no comparison between now and then. It was truly an art unto itself.
Things appear to be going bad for Stellantis and the Ram 1500 is now behind the Toyota Tundra in market share. Reader H4llelujah offers insight from the dealership side:
I hate that I keep harping on this and whining about Stellantis, but as a Ram salesperson, there’s a few factors at work here:
The biggest one is the amount of people trading in Ram leases for another Ram has absolutely CRATERED. People are not going to pay 499 a month for 3 years, and lease the EXACT same truck again for 699 when they can slide over to Ford, GM, or Toyota, and try something new for less money. Stellantis is stubbornly keeping rebates low, and lease rates high, for what reason I don’t know.
2nd, they dumped the hemi, leaving 2 options: an unknown (boosted) engine, and a reliable yet severely underpowered V6. GM and Ford will happily still sell you a V8, again, for less money.
3rd, Quality has just not gotten better. The 14-18 Ram bodystyle was incredibly reliable, and the 18 and newer style has been less so. Heater cores, Manifolds, front end parts, leaking back windows are all recurring issues. You fix them, they go bad again within a year. It’s not enough to make a man swear off the trucks, but it’s just enough to make a man think about trying something else.
It’s such a mess here at Stellantis, I’m actively planning my exit from the car business. I stake my reputation on the cars and trucks I sell, and from what Ive seen the past year, I cannot trust this manufacturer to make anything other than the wrong choices. I’m about fed up, and it looks like others are as well.
Have a great evening, everyone!