An old passion

When I was a child, like many children, I was fascinated by the automotive world. I loved spending hours to draw, so I used to draw cars, and refine expressive shapes, with big wings and enormous wheels. A friend of my parents had an Audi. I have discovered the Audi brand in 80’s. I was really impressed by this car, and it probably made me a fan of the Audi brand many years later. After these children passions for cars, I started to make video games, programming and computer graphics for many companies.

This work is like a return to an old passion, but this time with high computer graphics skill. I’m not a professional automotive designer. It’s a new dream to become one for a brand like Audi. But I’m only a computer graphic artist that works for many companies and projects. In automotive design, I experienced that the most complicated task is to define a brand design language that brings a personality to the cars and an emotional experience to users.

I think drawing cars more and more aggressive goes nowhere. It’s the simpler path to produce emotions, but humans like power against aggressiveness, smoothness against violence, swiftness against coldness, harmony against disorder. When we start from neutral ideas we can define a design language that fits for a sport car, a business sedan and a small car for city, and they will bring all a particular emotion. To find these neutral ideas, to find this idea that brings emotional serenity, to be near what future customers will love, we have to look at the industrial design in all markets: fashion, electronics, buildings, material, etc. I seems that when you have found the design rules and language, the design process of various cars is a simpler task.

My design process

I’m working both on hand made roughs, pen tablet, and 3d curve definition and set-up constrained by simple technical specification (passenger, seats, track, wheel base, etc). The combination of the 3 mind-to-paper process permits to have a very high feedback of the design improvement. The main goal is to synchronize hand made roughs with 3d curves. Printing 3d curves and manually refine them from various points of view with roughs is a fast step by step loop-based design process.

I think that producing eye candy drawings of cars with enormous wheels, small windows, nervous curves, aggressive look and Japan toys proportions is not the most difficult task. I think it is difficult to draw cars that are compatible with the industrial constraints and maintains attractiveness over the time.