Anyone remember the 90′s era? I remember when I was going to school, I used to love how the Art Center guys would create these juicy, eye popping renderings. The attention to detail with rich, saturated colors, crazy highlights, were just stunning to look at. I thought back thinking about the good old days and how design language at that time was a series of amorphous and organic shapes.
The conceptual cars at the time were exciting and concentrated so much on aerodynamics. My….. we have come such a long way. When I look at what we can make today vs back in the 90s, it is truly mind blowing. Virtually every conceptual car out there back in the 80s and 90s didn’t even come close to their production counterparts. We had a series of cars that took on the rounded organic shapes like the Toyota Celica, Mazda Miata, Mazda RX7, and even the Ford Taurus(Yuck!…luckily they made up for it in 2010!)
So I got inspired and decided to create a rendering of this fine looking cockroach on wheels! I had a ton of fun creating this. However I started off with a rendering on vellum, the traditional way with pastels, markers, pencils, the works! However as I went through my typical process I had discovered that I had been using Nu-Patels and it really sucked!
As a result, the pastel portions were less saturated and lacked a certain richness to it. So how did I fix it? Photoshop! Brought the whole thing into photoshop and corrected all my errors. In the end I think I just about re-rendered the whole thing.
Next time I’ll be more careful. In any case, here are some quick sketches on a craft paper pad with a touch of pastels and way too many highlights. Very 90′s feel to it. Much smaller pad which allows you to crank out a few in less time due to it’s size.
Shown above is a somewhat futuristic truck of some sort. Should have placed some sort of hookup behind to indicate that a trailer could be attached….but you get the idea.
Not too crazy about this one and the highlights are scattered everywhere. It’s always important for you to focus a little and take a step back and evaluate where the light source is. I missed the boat on this one….but that’s ok. Can’t progress unless you make a few mistakes now and then. Still…it was fun creating it. It’s sketches like these that you want to overlay, redo, and refine. I’ll post up a video of this process soon!
As always….if you have questions, drop us a line and we would be happy to help you!
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