Cutaway or ghost drawings or diagrams or whatever you call them are wonderful things. It’s hard to think of a way you can take the idea of a car into which you can see all the complex internal mechanisms and fluids and goops and somehow make it better, but GM found a way, in the 1980s: by jamming the whole mess right into outer freaking space.
Yes, when it comes to styles of cutaway diagrams that GM used, I think it’s safe to say that the pinnacle was reached when they gave everything a strange, etherial glow and placed the transparent vehicle upon a linear or sometimes gridded force field plane, and shot that plane into interstellar space.
Have another look at this GMC S-15 (the bedge-engineered sibling to the Chevy S-10) in all of its astronomical glory:
It’s not like the rest of the brochure really had any sort of space theme to it; it’s just that when it came to the cutaway diagram, GM’s marketing people understood the value of the infinite cosmos.
There were some similar, more subtle approaches, like this 1980s Oldsmobile Toronado cutaway that takes place in a black void, and enhances the illuminated lights with startbursts. This one also uses a double-exposed photographic approach to the cutaway, which may improve accuracy but loses significant amounts of charm.
Older GM cutaways were much more straightforward, preferring the clinical tidiness of a white void. This Monte Carlo one, for example, is also a strict profile view, which loses some of the drama of a three-quaerter view but makes the overall packaging a lot easier to comprehend.
Others, like this Buick Electra cutaway, have a much more utilitarian and informative bent, with obvious outlines and color-coding of various elements.
Maybe these are more rational, but wouldn’t all of these be improved if they were floating nobly in the great majestic void of space, with purple galaxies and nebulae spattered across the starry background?
Of course they would.
Cutaways always gave me the mistaken impression that car innards are painted in colorful disparate hues, only for me to be disappointed by the reality.
At least the Ineos Grenadier can be optioned with a red chassis, so that’s some part of the dream.
The great Frank Netter, MD became the gold standard for anatomical (and medical) illustration in the 20th century. Generations of physicians and other medical professionals learned anatomy at ‘ol Pappy Frank’s knee. (No one, to my knowledge, actually called him that.)
Imagine our disappointment upon learning that arteries aren’t deep red, veins aren’t cerulean blue, nerves aren’t yellow, and the stuff you’re looking at is—in contrast to Dr. Netter’s illustrations—wet and bloody and various nearly-identical shades of pink.
I nearly switched to Law School, but then I found out that law books didn’t have pictures at all.
Wasn’t Dave Kimble the great cutaway artist from back in the day?
My father was a commercial illustrator in the Detroit area, and did a lot of work for Oldsmobile and even Mercedes-Benz. Growing up watching him make these works of art, along with some artwork he did for me as gifts, was something I will always remember. Plus, he would make copies of a lot of car drawings, which I could then color in with my markers and colored pencils! Way more fun than standard coloring books!
Is his portfolio online anywhere?
…but is a much easier illustration to create.
Always loved cut-a-ways. What has pissed me off, from a very young space cadet, is “artistic” colorization of galaxies. Spectrometry has been around since Sir Isaac Newton, allowing chemical identification of light sources via “fingerprint” gaps in spectrum. and how they are shifted towards the red end from the Doppler effect. So we Know exactly what color it is, both static, and red shifted. Yet the resulting “true” image is deemed too boring for the masses (mostly black and white) and artificial coloring is done to punch it up. The difference in temperature in the cosmic microwave background, from the hottest point (depicted as red) to the coolest point (depicted as blue) is less than 1/10000th of a degree.
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.
And this is why we now sketch in Photoshop.
Yes, but do you think in CMYK or RGB? That is the true dividing line.
What kind of monster thinks in CMYK?
When was your shocking revelation that not everyone thinks in 3d ?
Mine was in the 90s when a technician expressed confusion with the wire-frame CAD model I was manipulating. I asked what do you mean? and he flat out said ” I think in 2d” NO WAY!, do you dream in 2d ? “yup”. He had been there for more than a year before me, and was a likable sort, and was functioning as CNC set-up tech, and was fine with blueprints, but quit when he got a job as a mailman.
Thanks for bringing up the memories of graphic design prior to the advent of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Aldus Pagemaker…
The “analog” world was so different from the “digital” world.
It’s like Wonder Woman’s invisible jet…in Spaaaaaace!
I wonder what CAD systems were available during the late 80s, early 90s to make this happen.
Cutaways predate CAD by a long shot. I believe before CAD, they were made by draftsmen and artists.
Yeah, definitely done on a board. CAD didn’t get this far until…. the ’00’s?? If that.
I’d wager they added in some photography compositing on some of them as well. The Toronado one looks primarily photography based.
Hence my comment why I think it’s a combination of draftsmen and artists (the artists being the photographers and the people that manipulate the photography elements).
Plus, I wouldn’t be surprised if certain drawn portions weren’t drawn from photographs. It’s a heck of a lot easier to take a picture of a partially assembled frame at some non-standard iso angle and then (basically) trace it, than it is to actually have a true draftsman draft it.
It’ll be interesting if Adrian comes in here and corrects me and gives us further insight if he knows.
Agreed on all points. Also would love to hear Adrian’s take.
GM would have been using their own proprietary systems (like everyone around this time). The GM systems were CGS (Coporate Graphics System) and Cadence. I wrote about this a while back:
https://www.theautopian.com/why-car-designers-have-used-computers-for-longer-than-you-think-and-how-boeing-helped-it-all/
I am amazed how good these drawings are based on the technology available back then, how powerful our tools are getting and what is next in the industry. Cars are safer now based on the tools we have today to accelerate development, study the structure of the vehicle, etc.
Hand drawn, probably first on mylar, based off the detailed technical/fabrication/assembly drawings.
My company used AutoCad in the early 90s to model aircraft hydraulics components for maintenance training systems. Also had a sophisticated graphics systems that cost over $100k back then. Don’t remember the make of this. What I do recall most, is that they took days to render anything. As a program manager, I had to build project development and production schedules and computer rendering time used to drive me crazy. The graphics program alone would appear laughably primitive compared to the simplest drawing program today, but it was the bees knees then. The times, they do change.
That’s a Flashback!…In late 90s/early 00s, I worked for a company that did ‘quick service’ restaurant interiors. They started doing ‘realistic’ renders of the dining room areas. IT would have around 12 of our regular work PCs grinding away on these all night after we logged out for day, just for one ‘render’!
My ‘pet peeve’ now is all of the ‘rendered’ pictures for products now, not an actual picture.The real product many times does match the ‘render’.
It is astounding how quickly computers advanced. When I was a freshman in college I took a basic programming course (literally Basic). We had to schedule time weekly on the university computer (there was only one), which took up the entire basement of the graduate research center. Ten years later, using VisiCalc and an Orange computer (a Japanese clone of the first Mac), a couple of us took our squadron scheduling office from grease pencil to computer spreadsheet management. And when Excel for Macintosh came out with a graphical interface, that just blew us away. From wrestling with DOS, transitioning to Windows, 286, 386, 486 machines, etc., all the way to this IPhone I’m typing on, I take none of this for granted. Still amazes me what can be done with 1s and 0s, and how much faster it all is. Makes my brain hurt sometimes.
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Back when auto shows were a Thing, GM loved to populate its exhibits with cutaways of engines, transmissions, etc. They were artworks, and I always wanted to have one.
A lot of time, effort and money had to go into those. Electric motors aren’t nearly as exciting as a 3800 V6 laid bare.
That Buick cutaway looks like a CAD render, with some transparency settings on body. Torch, does this automated method make it less compelling for you?
The rendering power to produce an image like this didn’t exist back then, so I suspect basic renders were produced digitally and then enhanced by hand.
Back when internal combustion engines were a thing I used to do cutaway drawings of engines.
But not the artistic kind, I’d do the drawings of how to machine chunks out of the cylinder head, block and cam covers to make show engines. The trick was to offset the cuts from the centrelines a tad so stuff like valves and pistons didn’t fall out when someone poked it at a car show or product launch.
Some poor bastard then had to clean up the machining marks and paint the edges red. It’s always red, dunno why.
The GMC S-15 one is also amazing because the actual truck is utterly conventional and has probably zero new ideas. But let’s show it off anyway!
They were probably trying to show it was built like a ‘real truck’, with a frame and all. Have to remember at the time, mini trucks were initially looked down upon as a ‘truck’, thinking it was just GM version of a VW Rabbit truck.