We’re super excited by this new book from designers Matt Morocco and Adam Hubers, recent CCS graduates and full-time product and automotive designers. Youth energy is awesome, and these dudes are harnessing it to the fullest, taking a pet project and placing it on Kickstarter. And you know what? They’ve already blown past their initial monetary goal, but that shouldn’t stop you from picking it up and supporting the duo.

The book is the kind that every designer has been waiting for, professional or student. It teaches the absolute necessary basics for car design. Literally, it WILL make you a better car designer — nothing beats the basics, after all. From perspective and looseness to tight sketches, the book gets it all jammed in there.

Stop what you’re doing, support these guys, and get the book here on Kickstarter.

February is over, and that means more awesome sketches were released in the month.  Point your eyeballs here for great digital work from Volkswagen, pencil sketches from Renault, sketches over photos by Lexus and Hyundai, classy Ssangyong work, and concept work from Scott Robertson.  Visit the gallery below.

[Via Autoblog, Drawthrough Jr, and CarBodyDesign]

Audi has released some new sketches of its upcoming Geneva A3-based concept car. The vehicle, which incorporates a “low, flowing roof dome and a coupe-like, low C pillar” looks like an A3 with a chopped roofline.  The shrunken DLO really gives the car an aggressive appearance.  The proportions of the vehicle in the sketch are probably very close to the actual car, and the the stance is all modern Audi.

The sketches are classic Audi, which is to say that even in a little bit of looseness in rendering style they’re still very tight and precise.  There are some nice cores and use of white space, with nary any fluff that we see in other, more glitzy concept sketches.  These are great to use as references for your demos.

[via Audi press release]

Scott Robertson, author of Drive, Cosmic Motors, and some of our favorite collections of vehicle art, has reached into his stacks of sketches and begun offering some of his best original pieces on eBay.  Robertson will be posting pencil sketches, marker renderings, and more on a regular basis, providing great material for instructors, collectors, and fans.

Work done in traditional media always trumps digital art, and Robertson’s work reflects that.  He has 340 flat pages that are ready to be sold.

Visit his eBay page here for the revolving collection.

Well, NAIAS 2011 came and went (our awesome Design coverage forthcoming) and January turned out to be a decent month for Designers.  We’ve gathered some of the best recent sketches, digital, over data, and otherwise, into a handy post to keep your eyes happy and your mind inspired.

Included are sketches of concept cars, fancy Photoshopping, blue pencils, and big, big wheels. Featured: Hyundai, Kia, Mazda, BMW, Cadillac, Fiat, and the future of F1.

Enjoy!

All images courtesy respective companies

Have a great Holiday everybody!!!  Keep an eye out for Santa’s new sleigh….

We haven’t had a Sketch P*rn in a while, so I felt it right to pull up some new OEM-provided sketches of vehicles debuting at NAIAS this year, and a few others to boot.

Included: a new Mini concept, a Buick Roadmaster, Ford’s Territory, Hyundai’s i40, a Civic, and a Ginetta.

Let your eyes and hearts enjoy.

[Source: Autoblog, Top Gear, CarBodyDesign, Ginetta]

Buy it at the CDf store now!!

If you don’t need any work done then still be sure to check out their website to view the amazing amount of Sketch P*rn loaded on the site.  If you need any rendering reference they have it all.  Skills cover everything from pencil sketches to highly polished renderings.  Click after the jump to see an assortment of images and the formal press release.

Press Release:

Hydra Design Labs, Southern California’s newest Automotive Design Studio has officially launched. Featuring a team of automotive design veterans; Jon Hull, Mike Desmond, Gary Ragle, and Chris Schuttera. Together they have worked on over 25 concept vehicles and over 20 production cars.

Hydra Design Labs focus is to provide all design services needed to take the clients project from ‘ideation to fabrication.’ In addition to their experience designing automotive exteriors and interiors, motorcycles, and products, Hydra also offers full CAD services, reverse engineering including laser scanning, prototyping, and manufacturing. Hydra Design Labs is also registered as a Government contractor. Their website offers up their portfolio in the form of the largest collection of work of any automotive design group featuring over 800 images.

Jon Hull, the President and one of the designers of Hydra Design Labs is very optimistic about the new studio saying “We’ve put together a unique studio in terms of talent, an all-star team of designers where each member is strong enough to run a studio by themselves.” According to Hull, this opens up new possibilities in terms of running projects. “Each designer could run an entire project, or collaborating together they could provide a devastating amount of talent.”

Hydra Design Labs takes its name from Lernaean Hydra the mythical creature, and like its namesake is also a multi-headed beast. The company is comprised of four designers each of whom has been working as a professional automotive designer for at least the last decade. Each designer was hand picked to form a new kind of design studio, an allstar team of the hottest automotive design talent. Each designer has worked on both Production programs and Concept cars, designing both exteriors and interiors. Individually each designer can stand alone, running an entire project from ideation to manufacturing. But bring the designers together and the full force of the studio can be felt by having all the designers collaborate on one project.

Hydras’ design team has an arsenal of skills ready to attack any project. Their designers specialize in many different aspects of vehicle design including concept and production cars, custom cars, eco-friendly vehicles, motorcycles, and movie concepts. Mike Desmond, the former Design Director at West Coast Choppers, not only brings his experience as a professional automotive designer, but his motorcycle design skills as well. Gary Ragle has worked as a car designer in California, Japan, and Detroit. Gary has designed numerous concept and production vehicles and his ability to distill design to its essence while always bringing something new and fresh to the table is a great strength he brings to the team. Chris Schuttera has worked for several automotive design houses, and has also designed airplane interiors. Chris’ knowledge of interior design and ability to rapidly develop themes for even the most complex design challenge is unparalleled in the industry. The design team was put together by Jon Hull who has had over 14 years experience as a professional automotive designer. He has worked on both exteriors and interiors for concept cars and production vehicles and is also a CAD specialist with a background in plastics engineering. “I feel very excited to be leading such a powerful team,” says Hull, “and can’t wait to show the design community what we are capable of.”

Title: DRIVE
Author: Scott Robertson
Publisher: Design Studio Press
Release Date: November 10th, 2010

“Scott Robertson’s DRIVE is both cool and badass.”

For more than a decade, concept designer Scott Robertson has been creating characters, worlds, and vehicles for video games and movies. His work spans from race cars to alien ships, and everywhere in-between. When he isn’t working on projects in the entertainment industry, he publishes coffee table collections of his artwork. His latest book, DRIVE, is a collection of concepts that showcases the process of developing vehicles for video games, from early sketches to final proposals.

Normally, these art books are collections of years of an artist’s work. Robertson produces one each year, and includes all new art based on a specific theme. DRIVE was done this way… in only 5 months. Granted, he worked with two interns over the course of two Summers (the tail end of 2009 and the beginning of Summer 2010) the quick compilation was nonetheless a huge undertaking.

Robertson explains to us that the two most important descriptive words used in entertainment design are “cool” and “badass“, and even those can be vaguely interpreted. It’s only until a game producer agrees that something is extremely cool and extremely badass that it gets pushed through.

With DRIVE Robertson wanted to have as much freedom to create cool and badass vehicles as possible, by focusing on four very different design themes: aerospace (think Mass Effect), military (a futuristic CoD), prosport (Split/Second), and salvage (Borderlands). Within each of these themes, Robertson developed a sports car, an off-road vehicle, a “big truck”, and motorcycles. Having just come off of completing Mass Effect 2, I found the aerospace theme to be extremely enticing. There’s just something about space-age minimalism that gets me every time.

The images are gorgeous — it’s the kind of stuff that you wouldn’t mind hanging on the wall of your cubicle, the desktop of your PC, or seeing on the intro screen of the latest Halo project. They capture moods, emotion, and fantasy, each as striking as the one before it. But that’s not what makes this book special.

The real magic is in the process of creation. From initial pen sketch to final digital painting, DRIVE details the steps that Robertson takes to create a vehicle set within a specific environment. It seems effortless, to the point where I feel like I can grab a piece of paper and do the same. Seeing how a design is developed, with the thoughts that go along with it, puts into perspective the amount of work that concept artists really need to go through to create a vehicle that works right, looks right, and feels right. The vehicles in DRIVE start as rough doodles, but through laborious work across two-page spreads they culminate in glorious images of weathered, worn, and stylized people-movers, in motion across deserts or in tunnels, in races or on strange planets.

The principle focus is that as long as 70% of the vehicle seems familiar — silhouette, stance, proportion — the remaining 30% can be completely original. You don’t have to actually design a Corvette to make a car look like one, just as long as it’s low to the ground, wide, and has a long hood. Add turrets, vents, and angular form language and the gamer will still consider the car to be Corvette-ish. It’s more about the emotional reaction to the vehicle: in the first 3 seconds, the player will see it, react to it, and decide whether to choose it or not. Luckily, the majority of the vehicles in DRIVE all fall into that former category.

I also loved seeing the different techniques that Robertson used to create the images. Whether using a 10% gray marker, creating collages of photographs of airplanes at an air museum, or modeling the images in modo each method leads to a unique design. The use of sketching tool Alchemy, for instance, creates wild abstract digital paintings that focus more on color and form rather than line drawings or details. It’s a bit of art geekery that is appreciated.

However he made each image, its easy to cone away from each page with a bit of awe. This is where game designs come from. The cool ones. The badass ones. DRIVE is the perfect aspirational art book for those of us interested in creating, as well as those of us that are perfectly fine leaving the creation up to the masters. And even though the vehicle fan will probably like this more than the Street Fighter fan, DRIVE is as cool and badass as concept art books can get.

This review is based on an advance copy of the book purchased during a lecture by the author in September. All images courtesy Scott Robertson and Design Studio Press