Bruce Thomson's Sketches
More shirts! These are 3 different shirts (1 for each car) that will be available for purchase at https://www.blipshift.com/ on Friday May 31st. As ever, these are available for a limited time only, so if you want one, you’ll have to check out the site Friday or early Saturday! All proceeds go towards my saving for an E type… 🙂
I did this work about 4 years ago for a client who was writing a book about the Ferrari 330GTC and wanted a “cutaway drawing” as well as “Designer comments” on the car. I couldn’t have been more excited… and got myself stuck in. This was the first full “cutaway drawing” that I had ever attempted and I found it immensely challenging and very rewarding. I had gotten as far as the Adobe Illustrator line work (beneath the sketch) when it became apparent that the book was not going to be published, so, all of this was for naught.
Sad – but a great experience nonetheless.
While in Rochester, got to see this – a Frank Lloyd Wright house (the Boynton House) of which I was unaware. It’s not far from the George Eastman Museum. I sketched this at home as it is a private home and the people who live there deserve their privacy and our respect (and probably didn’t need me sitting on the sidewalk with my sketchbook for an hour…). Apparently they bought it in the early 2000s and spent a fortune restoring it.
There is apparently a documentary on the restoration by New York Public Broadcasting channel WXXI entitled “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Boynton House: The Next Hundred Years”. It is available on youtube. 🙂
A sketch of the Lunar Camera (Actually, “Lunar Orbiter Photographic Subsystem”) on display at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. This thing is big – about 1 metre square, and massively complex. Built, I think in 1967. Today, would probably fit in a box about 5 cm cubed…. 🙂
More development. I thought the last batch needed some “softening” in places in order to relate to the original E Type form – but I fear I may have softened these too much now and will need to tighten up some of the body in order to make it look a little more futuristic and a little less retro.
These are some preliminary sketches I’ve done for a project I’m working on. My Colleague, Tony Fiore (The bloke who runs our shop at school) and I are going to make a 1/4 scale hard styling clay model this spring (after the semester has been completed) and will be documenting the process in the hope that it will be beneficial to our students. I’ll keep you up to date on our progress here. Tony will have to agree to this concept but I suspect he will. If this has ANY similarity to a modern version of an E Type FHC, that is, I assure you, entirely coincidental. 🙂
The sketches are still loose and don’t necessarily hold accuracy from view to view, but I’ll be tightening this up as I go along.
Another shirt coming out on blipshift this coming Monday…This one a Renault Alpine A110. I wanted to have it titled “Je t’aime” but blipshift has gone with something else.
A work in progress – as you can see. This one is tricky – again – it’s small – and I don’t want to resort to small (000) brushes but it’s hard not to given the detail in the bridge. I can see that need to increase the arch on the upper left hand side – but this is stuff you miss when you’re doing detail. The colour still probably needs to be adjusted (less grey, a little more taupe), but as stated – a work in progress.
I’ve ignored paintings since working on a piece of Fernando Alonso winning the European Grand Prix of Valencia in a Ferrari. This seemed to be the perfect subject – and I had all the reference and this painting was going to be GREAT. It wasn’t. I worked and worked. I painted gesso over half the painting and tried again. But the more I worked the worse it got.
I sketched a lot after this, 🙂
Evelyn has been bugging me to paint (clever woman) and so I took on a couple of smaller projects – the above is from a shot I took in Venice (bet you couldn’t tell, eh?) back in 2014. It’s small… about 30 x 15 cm – which was a mistake – the smaller painting take as long as a larger painting because of the detail – but it was a good way to work myself back in…
I’ve been busy of late, but not posting, as you’ll have noticed. My students were recently working on a “classic redesign” and one of the subjects (surprise, surprise) was a 1976 Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce. Wonder where that came from? Well amongst many others there was a Mercedes 300sl convertible, a Dino Ferrari and a Jaguar XKSS – none of which ( /-: ) I own… still I pitied my students their work and did a little myself. I thought the drawing of the original car was quite good… but the re-design??? Shock – horror… welcome to 1990… Uggh. I’m getting old (or perhaps I’m already there).
🙂
Caught in my headlights