It's a Back Alley Brawl, Y'all

Here's a family feud that car fanatics have wrassled over for nearly 40 years:

Two cars from one car company, both archetypal muscle cars of the late 60's and early 70's, both designed and marketed to lure torque-starved gearheads away from hot-selling Mustangs and Camaros. These two cars are so embedded in automotive lore that arguments over the superiority of each is the subject of bar stool ballyhoo and online forum fights to this day. In a time when design sensibilities change so rapidly that it's an insult to say, "that's so 2004," the fact that this argument has survived across a generation is a testament to the timeless appeal of these classic cars.

Charger vs. Challenger. Read on...




This illustration is an expanded version of a simpler one I made for my graphic design partner Justin Kite for the promotion of the upcoming Gear Grinder car show in Kansas City, MO on April 17th and 18th. The poster version loses the background buildings to give Justin more elbow room for his design. Limited edition prints of both the promotional poster and the full illustration will be on sale at the show.

For dynamic scenes like these, my usual process would normally have started with a series of thumbnail sketches showing varying points of view, car orientations, and lighting schemes. After selecting the one that the client and I liked, I'd work up a pencil rough of the entire scene before inking, scanning, and embellishing with digital enhancements. Using this process, a scene like this would take, on average, six to eight hours to finish. That's not out of the ordinary for illustration work, but I've been working recently on updating my workflow to reduce the number of early thumbnail sketches I need to get the design layout established. It's hard to call any process that includes a scanner and Photoshop "old school," but that's pretty much what it's becoming.

I now use Google SketchUp to build rough, block models of the major components - in this case, the three cars and the buildings - and push them around the scene until I get the pose I like. The models aren't at all detailed; I'm just careful to locate the wheels at the proper wheelbase and track width, and I try to model the basic body proportions so that they match the car model and year I'll be drawing. To add a sense of motion, I can steer the wheels and roll the bodies against the direction of the turn. I can even change the shadows by varying the sun angle and time of day, all before graphite ever hits paper.

Once the scene is defined in SketchUp, I can print out a low-res .jpeg that I export from the model and use it as an underlay for the detailed sketch. For this scene, I used the same model for all three cars - the Charger, the Challenger, and the cop car in the background. Dozens of photo references of the real cars helped me make the final drawings look accurate. The SketchUp model even provided rough locations for the buildings so I could quickly overlay details like bricks, windows, exhaust hoods, and flying trash cans.

For now, I'm not saving much time in the overall process because of the front-loaded time suck involved in building the models. But once I have generic block models of a few trucks, hot rods, and muscle cars, I'll have a handy kit of parts for any new project.

Now back to the drawing board.

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