I'm still fascinated by cutaway illustrations. As a child they were my staple, being core to any decent book on aircraft and tanks, and being the son of an architect who also happened to be a frustrated RAF pilot, himself a young boy during the war, guess what I was
surrounded by (click for some more examples:
F35B,
Camper, and
E-Type and a
bunch more)?
Even toys of the time came in cutaway form (warning - I'm about to go into Star Wars mode). A kid's imaginative bridge into other worlds was best facilitated in this way, and a small boy's curiosity is piqued by nothing more than miniaturisation and despotic facilitation (making bugs fight, saving lives in Corgi car crashes with Corgi ambulances, building better Lego masterpieces for a better Lego world - actually, those little lego people never had toilets!). What little boy didn't want the Millenium Falcon's chess set, Wookie rules or otherwise? I would myself have settled for a Millennium Falcon or
AT-AT walker toy.
 |
| Barnes Wallis's Wellington - real life cutaway |
And who didn't imagine their toy soldiers actually getting up and beating the crap out of each other? Perhaps I went too far - my imaginary maulings and dismemberings, my armies being run over by tanks, painted sandbags blown to bits, brick-effect building walls crushing plastic head-scratching squaddies, turned me into something of a pacifist. I guess girls liked the same miniature animation and control thing with their dolls houses,
but a disco ball? Really? No, only baby Maggie Thatchers of the world would have taken that the extra step to doll wars and utter domination of one's miniatures.
I never understood how anyone would have had the patience to draw these things. They were marvellous.
Each "weave" in a
Vickers Wellington basket-frame drawn as the fuselage was cut away to show the inside, where the detailing was also exquisite. I couldn't even draw the outside properly (I was about 7 at the time), so how could anyone draw something so intricate, let alone design it in the first place? Of course, Barnes Wallis was himself something of a Crazy Monkey Genius so perhaps I was setting my standards a little too high.
I had thought that with the onset of powerful computing abilities, with very lucrative gaming markets driving computer graphics theory and applications, that this was a lost art. But today, DMC set me straight. It's alive and well, and incredibly intricate.
This site contains not only countless examples of the art, but also
detailed tutorials on how it's done (both for
cutaways (at first glance a ghost, but look at the engine) and "
ghosting", providing a fantastic insight into the workings and mind-bending attention to detail of the industry. Although DMC primarily designs accessories, bags and shoes, many of the techniques that are used in the technical cutaways are relevant there too. And it never ceases to surprise me how useful something like a three-dimensional rendering of an object is to those tasked with building it from scratch. I suppose a bag isn't quite an ocean liner, but tailors take a two-dimensional plan and turn it into a suit, so how come factories in Hong Kong can't take two-dimensional plans and turn them into a bag without being "shown a fucking picture"?
KHulsey.com also contains a history of the main figures in the technical illustration and cutaway drawing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, two of the big names are Japanese (
Yoshiro Inomoto and
Makoto Ouchi), although all four people listed (Inomoto, Ouchi,
Porter and
Kimble) produce stunning work. Check it all out if you have the time. This Hulsey Crazy Monkey Genius has put a lot of stuff up there to look at.
Labels: Art, Crazy Monkey Genius, Cutaway, Engineering
