The Auto Show came to Cleveland this year again, which is the next stop after the world famous Detroit auto show. All of the amazing car designs (and a few lack luster ones) inspired me to diversify my portfolio. While I have geared my designs in the past for a more fictional use for the entertainment industry, I decided it is not a huge leap for me to cross over into real world vehicle application. One of my career heroes, Syd Mead did both fictional and real world designs to great success after all, and my great grandfather worked for GM in the good old days.

Car design is an amazingly nuanced and technical art form, I found out the hard way after a lot of painful trial and error. For me to even attempt to accurately paint a car properly required a lot of research. It helps to have a love of motor sports and to know how certain types of cars work from a mechanical standpoint. Lots of variables to consider with painting cars too, complex reflective and translucent surfaces, three dimensional circles! Gaaah! I did not take any technical courses in art school on car design to make matters more tricky, but we did learn how to render them in my training as a sequential artist. This illustration was done completely without the use of any 3D modeling software. like all my vehicles drawings, I use carefully drawn isometric perspective guide lines in Photoshop with a wacom graphics tablet and drop them out of the image afterwords.

Why did I chose to take on the Chevy Corvette first? Because I love a challenge. The Corvette has always held a venerable, almost mythical status here in the USA, (with the exception of Ford fans) and even has garnered a respect from auto fans in other parts of the world since it’s introduction in 1953. While the weight of it’s name may have waxed and waned over the years from generation to generation, and gained lots of amazing competition from foreign made sports cars, it always sets out to do what it set out to do. Be a super car without the super car price tag!

The C7 Corvette is slated to be unveiled soon by Chevy, amidst a lot of speculation as to what it may look like and how it will be different from a technical standpoint to the C6. I don’t expect it to look nearly as eccentric as the one featured in the recent Transformers film. The auto industry has a tendency to play it safe in terms of visual design, so often concept cars are much more eccentric than the production models. I attempted to try and adapt to that tendency with this piece.

This is meant to be the C8 version, so the next generation after next years, and this is meant to be the sportier ZR1 version also. Some of the tech I had in mind was a mid to rear mounted engine, for better balance. wether or not it would be a gasoline engine or some alternative fuel source is anyone’s guess and will depend highly on the cost of fuel near the year 2020. The body of the car is covered by an adaptive organic light emitting diode matrix, which allows the driver to change the color of the car in real time from the door-to-door touch screen and voice controlled computer console. The headlights and tail lights appear to vanish into the body of the car when they are turned off due to a new material that only lets light out but not in and has the same surface qualities as the body of the car. The suspension, handling, gear shift, and vehicle stability assist are all controlled by advanced computer systems.
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On an unrelated note, I am still interested in working as a digital artist for full-time, part-time, or contract work, Send me an email. Resume by request. Lets take your company's visual design to the next level together.

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Prolificpen is available for commissions year round! Email ydavros@gmail.com or message here for info.

This image is the copyrighted intellectual property of the artist. Art thefts will be taken extremely seriously. Legal action will be taken if necessary.