Above: Engraving of the Heilmann Locomotive engine, published in La Nature, Revue des sciences et de leurs applications aux arts et à l'industrie, 1898.Anybody who knows me knows that I love a good "cutaway", a pictorial device where the outer wall, shell, or skin of an building, machine, or being has been graphically 'cut away' to reveal the guts housed within. I can't remember when I first got into cutaways, possibly around the time that I started working at a
company specializing in information graphics and the occasional technical rendering. It may have been earlier, having always loved images like this one, taken from The
Collier's Space Flight series, 1952 - 1954, written by Werner Von Braun and illustrated by Fred Freeman:
At any rate, I started working cutaways into a lot of my illustrations and
comics. Being able to show the exterior and interior inner-workings of something simultaneously is a powerful and practical tool! Here is a quick painting I did for a friend one time, describing a fantasy I had (and still have) about my ideal workspace:
Here's an old cutaway drawing found in a series of 16th century woodcuts by early Jesuit Jerome Nadal, called the
Evangelicae Historiae Imagines. A detailed, instructional guide for prayerful meditation, Nadal's woodcuts could be described as gospel infographics. Here's the third plate (of out 153):
The numbered items at the bottom of the woodcut annotate the main image with biblical references and suggestions for prayer specific to that sub-scene. Note than in this image, in addition to the main nativity scene taking place in the cave (a sort of natural cutaway), there's a cutaway drawing at the lower right showing an angel announcing Jesus' birth to souls in limbo within the earth. Working at the peak of the scientific revolution (Copernicus'
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was published in 1543, the
Evangelicae Historae Imagines in 1593), it makes sense why Nadal would enhance his sacred images with the conventions of the modern mechanical diagram. Read more about these "compositions of place"
here.
Above: In "The Ghost of Dragon Canoe", a story published in
Kramers Ergot #5, I used lots of cutaways, or "ghosted views". I wanted to create a separate narrative structure (i.e. Forensic Doom) that overlaid the entire story, invisible to the characters. The story is about a church youth-group on a field trip in an old-fashioned schoolbus, riddled with dangerous design flaws unbeknown to them. Here are a couple more drawings I've done prominently featuring a cutaway:
The first is a
poster I made to advertise my new comic book series, which will be published by
Buenaventura Press. The second is a drawing of a fort
(now in the permanent collection of Rina Ayuyang) that our Dad built us in the backyard as kids. I named this blog after that fort, affectionately referred to as the "Suitcase" because of its unique structure, external and internal.
Despite attempts to liberate the cutaway from architectural, medical and mechanical industries, the bread and butter of cutaway renderers world-wide still comes from publishers of sex education textbooks and in automotive part manuals. And that's where we belong!
Below: A hot tub I drew recently for a local spa manufacturer to be used in a trade brochure, rendered completely in vectors using Adobe Illustrator (v8).
Apparently, last week at the annual awards gala of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in Little Rock, Arkansas, a piece I worked on with the Riverfront Times won a 1st-place editorial award in a category called the 'Format Buster' (I'm not sure what the trophy looks like). The piece, master-minded by the fine dudes at the RFT, was a series of clip-able Bingo cards designed for attendees of the world's third largest Mardi Gras celebration, in the Soulard neighborhood of St. Louis. I did all the illustrations for the cards (downloadable as a .pdf here) and also for the cover:
It was fun making all the funny little drawings (funny because they're TRUE) and also figuring out how to construct convincing beer stains and crummy pink halftones on a trump l'oeil, beaten-up Bingo card. If you were around during Mardi Gras, you probably stepped over actual beer-stained, beaten-up copies; but what you didn't see was the first, alternate version of the Mardi Gras Bingo game:
As shown, my first inclination was to establish a system of pictograms for each Bingo card. The system I had in mind existed somewhere between the famous library of glyphs developed for Montreal's Expo 67 by Paul Arthur (coiner of the term "signage") and Otl Aicher's icons for the '72 Olympic Games in Munich. My thinking was that this kind of scientific visual language would be a funny contrast to the content, and that maybe vector/diagram boobs are classier than brush & ink/cartoon boobs? I'll let you be the judge; here are all the pictograms versus their more cartoony counterparts (click for larger views):
Obviously, we ended up going with the more illustrative approach and never looked back. The pictograms may have provided more streamlined gameplay in terms of congitive speed - your eyeballs and brain aren't wasting time decoding hand-drawn beads of sweat flying off an ornery handcuffed hoosier's wrinkled brow (and furthermore, if and where it appears on your Bingo matrix) - but who cares? Every one at Mardi Gras is totally trashed anyways. An argument could also be made that well executed pictograms are more universally recognizable to people from different cultural, educational, and economic backgrounds. In my experience though, Soulard Mardi Gras is not exactly the Montreal Expo, if you know what I mean. In closing, sorry to Paul Arthur and Otl Aicher, but give me a nicely tapered cartoon boob any day of the week!
