Art Journal 023: Cars

Cars are probably one of the more intimidating elements of a modern or semi-modern story setting that you can’t really always get away without ever drawing. What probably makes them really intimidating from a design perspective is that they’re made up of so many facets which themselves are often -curved- so if you were to look at one you have to do an extra bit of unravelling to figure out how one shape fits with another.  It doesn’t help that the actual physical car itself and what goes on under the hood is an enigma in itself, which only serves to make the whole machine just this big metal rolling enigma we depend on to carry us about our daily lives.  This week my goal is to help dispel some of the mystery behind drawing cars- or at least how I draw them- so readers and artists alike can hopefully achieve a better appreciation of how the noble car fits together!

Disclaimer: drawing vehicles depends very heavily on being able to imagine and spin abstract geometric shapes around in your head and then draw them from different angles.  If you’re the artist-type and you’re not already used to this, a good exercise is to just freehand draw a ton of boxes, wedges, hemispheres, hexagonal barrels and any other three-dimensional form you can think of, and then draw that same form at the same size rotated at different angles.  Master this and everything will come so much easier.

Since I tend to start these lesson-type entries off with an example piece to sort of illustrate the points I try to make afterwards I’ll begin this one with one of my favorite cars to appear in my own comic: a 1969 Dodge Charger (A I).  Rule number one of drawing a car is to look up your references!  I chose the Charger specifically because I liked the shape of it, I like its lines and I like muscle cars from that era, but also because the Charger was also Bo and Luke Duke’s very own General Lee.  Since I planned from the start for Lizzie and Alice to take Pat’s car and ramp it in the air this was the perfect car to use, since there was a whole generation of references behind it AND I get the bonus pop-culture connection out of the deal as well.  In looking for references I also noticed the Charger came with a couple feature options, like whether or not the front grill had a prominent divider or if the headlights were behind black, so I picked-and-choosed parts to make my own Charger- a blue racing-stripe car with exposed headlights and the bare black grill and a scoop on the hood to make it look fast and cool!  And since I had to draw it from multiple angles I became very acquainted with the most significant visual features to capture this specific type of car (A II).  The 1969 Dodge Charger had a very wide, thin grill. It had a low profile with wide-set tires, so capturing the width and flatness became vital. I sort of fudged some of the scale of it- it’s a big bigger of a car in real life than I actually drew it- but it was also important for Lizzie and Alice to show up in the windshield so the exact scale of it wasn’t important to my ends.  The other element I had to be conscious of was the angle of the cabin roof and its position in the overall shape of the car (A III).  The Charger is a two-door car with a tiny little back seat with no real trunk space.  The front third of it is all hood- it was easy to not draw too much trunk but I often found myself using the magic wand tool to pull the hoods I drew in Photoshop out a bit more to give it a proper muscle car feel.  I poured over tons of reference material and I can draw a 1969 Dodge Charger from memory now, but it was a long road to get there, and this is a bit of the thought that went into that whole arc of the comic.

Okay, so we have our reference photos and we’re all ready to draw cars vaguely inspired by existing cars, but there’s a problem!  We’re looking at these photos and its all curved lines and unhelpful camera angled and it looks like the roof looks like this but I keep drawing it too big, what’s happening?  How do you make sense of any of this?  Well!  Like we covered in our journal entry on firearms, knowing how the machine is put together is an excellent way of figuring out how to visually break a complicated geometric shape down into chewable components. The problem with cars is they come in SO MANY sizes, shapes, styles and every individual part of them has a thousand possible variations in scale and angle, so how can you possibly break down every possible variation of car in a way that makes sense no matter what you’re looking at?  

That’s a daunting task, but fortunately I have a formula to share!

When I approach a car design and try to make sense of just what it is I’m looking at I’ll break the design down into seven major components, each one serving a specific function (B I)!  This makes it much easier to break the car down onto easier-to-draw parts, which I can then flesh out into more detail once their proportioned and perspectived how I like them to be.  Here’s a quick rundown of what we’re looking at:

1. The engine block piece.  This is probably the hardest of all the shapes to block in, considering how many cars’ front ends taper and slope to give them a good aerodynamic profile so this part will often have a gentle slant to it, with a grill in the front designed to take in air and help cool the engine down, so the front-most face will take in air and the rest will direct it backwards gently, both on top and, often, underneath as well.  This is where a lot of the characteristic aesthetic details of the car will go, and I sort of cheated on the “one simple shape” rule immediately and made this one a bit more complex.  The main body of it houses the engine, which is often a big thing surrounded by belts, batteries and plastic fluid tanks.  Since the engine lives in here your front wheel wells will typically also live here as well- sometimes they’re closer to the front, sometimes they’re closer to the back, but remember that the front wheels go on this piece and you should do fine.  On the top we have the slope of the hood which flattens off into this other thing- that “other thing” up top is my shorthand for the vent area where the windshield wipers live.  Instead of drawing the hood all the way up to the glass of the windshield I find it helps to mark off that little strip of black.
2. The front windshield piece.  This gets to be its own piece because it serves a number of roles!  It’s a bridge between the slope of the hood and the roof, and thus connects two important parts of the car’s aerodynamic shape.  This is often where you’ll be seeing your characters from, so thinking of it as a visual frame can help you block in your camera shots to make sure the important details are prominent, whether or not they happen to be those characters.  It’s also a separate piece because it’s worth remembering just how deep a windshield slope can be, and the fact that the windshield doesn’t go back over the character, it stays over the -dashboard-.  When you’re inside a car your windshield might seem right in front of you but stick your hand over the dashboard and feel just how far forward it goes- it’s often quite deep!  Jeeps and trucks have flatter, more vertical windows but for many passenger cars it’s quite a slant!  This fits right over the back of piece (a), the windshield sloping right down into the area where the windshield wipers are. Don’t forget the horizontal curve as well as the vertical one!
3. The cabin.  This is where your occupants live!  The front engine piece (a) fits right into the front of it.  It’s basically a big basic box, though the sides where the door are can have a convex shape to them, tapering out from the bottom of the door to taper back in near the door handle, but that’s a very gradual angle where its present.  The driver’s side doors tend to live entirely in this chunk; a two-door car‘s doors will be here entirely but a four-door car’s rear doors might have some slight overlap between this piece and (e), but we’ll cover that more when we get there.
4. The roof.  This one is a deceptive part of the car!  The roof typically tapers inward from the place where it connects to the cabin, which we can broadly say is “the bottom of the side windows”.  We can see this inward slope clearly in figure (A III).  This part is where peoples’ heads go, and that’s often just high enough to fit an averagely-tall person without a tremendous amount of overhead space.  This piece fits directly with (b) and down onto (c) to give the occupants the bulk of their living space.
5. The trunk. This is the all-purpose buttcheek-end of the car where a whole bunch of hidden magic happens.  As our little name suggests, this is where a car’s trunkspace lives, but it’s also where the gas tank lives, and often if there’s a rear seat the backrests of those seats are a part of this piece.  As mentioned in (c) the rear doors can sometimes reach into this area, mostly considering the back of the seat is actually here- you’ll often see a rear door taper up over the rear wheelwell because of this.  Speaking of which: the rear wheel wells exist in this piece, as you can often see their shape intruding into the trunk space.  If the car has a spoiler it’s often either a gentle upward slope at the back of this or a tremendous superstructure mounter on top of it. There’s often a slight upward slope to the bottom of this piece similar to the slope of the front end, to prevent drag underneath and complete the aerodynamic shape.
6. The rear headspace. This one’s basically the piece that connects the whole cabin together!  It bridges the slope of the roof down into the angle of the trunk and is often the place with the reverse-dashboard panel between the rear speakers behind the back seat someone in the supermarket parking lot will always keep stuffed full of plush toys.  The rear headspace can be deceptive in photos- it might look like a gentle rearward slope from the side but on some model cars it can be a vertical window set between two sloping piece of side panel framing!
7. The wheels.  These are important, they make the car go forward.  They typically live inside the wheel wells but in scenes of automotive collision they’ve been known to travel this way or that.  An important item to note about wheels is how thick a tire actually is.  It’s easy to look at the tire and draw it as a circle, as thin as a bike tire, but you have to remember these are often very wide and grippy, extending into and under the car. Give them a bit of cylindrical girth, like two mint tins stacked on top of each other, or half a soda can.

Using this formula you can very easily invent an imaginary, real-looking car all your own!  Or, if you’re using a reference, this can help you slice it up into component parts to help you better understand what’s going on inside that lump of steel and paint.  I drew the diagram mostly off the top of my head, so for fun I decided to copy it and try to assemble the pieces in Photoshop to see how they look (B II).  It turns out it doesn’t look half-bad!  It’s rather similar to my old Charger.  The system works!

This formula isn’t just limited to muscle cars, either!  With a clever eye you can abstract these seven components into any type of modern vehicle imaginable.  For example, while the Charger was fun, Lou’s Van is probably the most prominent single vehicle in the entire comic so far (C I).  Using our formula we can see how a van has a tall and very stubby engine component, with a tall and very flat windshield.  The cabin and roof segment is short, representing the space the driver occupies, and then we take the trunk and the rear headspace parts and stretch them aaaaaaaall the way back and we have the rear cabin of the van!  Even though it has a completely boxy shape it still conforms to the formula!  Lizzie’s ill-fated old car is a good example of a four-door sedan (C II).  Her car was an old clunker, so it had a wide front engine block piece. It used mostly boxy, ugly shapes, and the roof & rear headspace fed into one another to give the rear-seated passengers a bit more headroom- you can also see in our formula how much of a rear door would exist in the trunk-panel space.  And I don’t think I’ve drawn many of these in the comic but a pick-up truck is a very common permutation of our formula as well! (C III).  A pick-up usually has a tall, deep engine block to give it all that torque power!  The windshield is fairly vertical and the cabin space is clearly delineated.  What’s notable about the pick-up is the trunk space is just one tremendous bucket, and often there’s no rear headspace at all!  Although you can substitute this nothingness for either a big cover piece or an angled rack frame or a number of other features, the classic pick-up shape really underscores the component structure of a modern car.  The formula makes it all really easy to imagine and break apart!

So we’ve explored the outside of a car, but sometimes our cars don’t stay on the road.  Sometimes they go soaring through the air or tumbling along the pavement and we catch a glimpse of their dark secret: the underside of a car.  Have you seen the underside of a car? What the hell is even going on down there!  This nightmare of shapes can likewise be broken down into basic shapes if you know what to look for!  So as a quick inventoried list, here’s what’s what:

D I: This is the radiator, it’s basically the “grill” of the car you see behind the grill of the car.  Odds are you won’t see this from the underside but it’s good to know it’s there.

D II: The engine block.  This is where your car’s motor is, in addition to all the belts, batteries and fluid tanks that surround it.  It’s usually at the front of the car, between the radiator and the cabin.

D III: The axels.  The wheels on the bus go ‘round and ‘round, and they usually do so on these guys.  Old old cars would have one big axel but many modern cars have independent suspension which means the wheels will be mounted on their own little piece of triangle metal.

D IV: The transmission box.  This is where your car’s gears live, and the engine powers one gear that feeds into the transmission box from the motor. A “gear” is literally the size of the gear connecting the motor’s power gear to your car’s wheels- a larger gear will produce more torque but a smaller gear will give you more speed, and they all live in here.  You can see how the transmission box is positioned right up next to the driver’s seat!  Very convenient, especially if you’re driving a stick.  Behind the transmission box is the drive train shaft, which sends power to the rear wheels. Rear-wheel drive cars let their back wheels do all the pushing and the front wheels mostly just steer, and this drive shaft is how that power gets from the motor to the back of the car.

D V: The cabin area.  There’s usually a bunch of other shapes on top of this big boxy area but this huge space is typically where peoples’ feet are. It makes -way- more sense when you know to look out for it.

D VI: The exhaust pipe.  All the fumes generated by the engine have to go somewhere, so usually alongside the drive shaft there’s one or two pipes leading to the back of the car, attached to a big muffler.  These are for the exhaust. This is the primary means by which your car ruins the environment.

D VII: The gas tank.  When you’re at the pump pouring gas into the mystery hole this is typically where it goes.  

D VIII: The trunk.  This shape is the indent made by all that space you either fill with luggage for friends you’re giving rides to the airport or, if you’re like me, you fill with garbage you swear you might need someday but never actually do.  Keep your jumper cables in here, you might need them someday.

D IX: The spare tire well.  Have you ever noticed how many spare tires have their own little hideyholes underneath the floor of the trunk? They usually show up as an indent on the underside of the car.  It sort of ruins the magic of the mystery of it, I know.

Cars are very intimidating subjects to draw but they don’t have to be impossible!  You can take the teeth out of them by breaking them down into their broad component parts and assembling them piece by piece.  References are helpful but once you get the hang of the Seven Pieces you can begin to experiment with all sorts of fun shapes and designs and have them come out looking like real, useable cars!  Just remember the formula and you’ll have nothing to fear from these terrors of the road.