Ferrari F40 Illustration

History of the Ferrari F40 Illustration

The Ferrari F40 was one of the first highly detailed drawings in Deneba's series of cutaway illustrations. Deneba artist Dave Rumfelt gives us several insights into the project's creation:

This project was really a challenge. We were creating the illustration for use in Canvas 3.0 ads and packaging and we were drawing it all on a Mac IIx with only 8 megs of RAM and a lowly 8-bit graphics card capable of only 256 on-screen colors. At the time, though, this was a fairly powerful system.

Part of the challenge also was the fact that the drawing was being created using newly developed tools running on a very early beta of Canvas 3. Our programmers were writing new, custom tools as I came upon each new challenge, and debugging the tools as I encountered new bugs.

The art was based on an air-brush painting done by the famous cut-away artist David Kimble. The artwork was originally a fold-out found in a popular car enthusiasts magazine.

Using tracing paper taped down on the art, I blocked out a grid of 1 inch by 1 inch squares. In Canvas I used the Grid tool to make a similar on-screen grid which was placed on its own Canvas layer.

Using additional new layers, I started drawing the basic shapes of the body of the car. We had also planned on using the car - sans cutaways - on ads and packaging, so this part of the drawing was tackled first. Unfortunately, it was difficult to create because David Kimble's cutaways were in key locations, and we were forced to use other reference material to get the missing body details.

Having the body done, I started creating the body paint by using Canvas's blend tool to blend shapes together. Very strange shapes were needed to get the subtleties of color changes and reflections seen on real cars. The blended objects were intentionally made oversized so that they would hang outside the original object. Then the original body outline object was used like a cookie-cutter to cut away the "excess." When each part was colored and assembled we had the entire exterior of the car.

For a step-by-step look at how I created the blends for the body panels and other parts, click here. Note: This page contains many images.

Although it appears as though the body panels were cut open to reveal the insides, actually the cut-aways "float" on top of the body. I turned off the drawing layer that contained the body and created a new layer for the cut-aways.

Referring to the gridded pencil sketch, I creating the individual "cut-out"areas. Objects that "crossed over" from one cut-out to the next were drawn in their entirety and sliced at the cross over area. I always draw all the outlines of my objects first and then, using the cookie cutter approach described above, fill in the object's blended colors.

When I got to the engine area, I had a hard time distinguishing one object from another on the original artwork. David Kimble was gracious enough to provide us with copies of his original, unpainted drawings and working drawings of the engine area. It's truly amazing to see this man's sketches of machine parts and gears. I couldn't have done it without his help!

Some of the transparency effects were done by simply taking pieces of one completed object and putting them on top of other completed objects. For instance, the rear tire. By simply bringing the tires tread to the top of that area you get the visual effect of looking through the tire.

Other areas like the rear window were given a transparent effect by slicing the objects behind the window object and then bringing those sliced pieces to the front. After selecting these objects, I tinted their foreground and background color toward white to give them the washed out look as if they were behind glass.

When all the pieces were done, I moved all the individual cut-out groups onto one layer and deleted the grid layer. Due to the limitations of the graphics card, I had no idea what the colors were like until we made film separations and saw the first match-print. I was pleased with the end results.

Here are some facts about the piece. The file is 5.5 Mb when uncompressed. There are over 32,000 objects. The original size of the art is 1 x 3 feet.

Since it was created in 1991, this illustration has been used worldwide in printer ads, posters, and has even been used to benchmark the performance of different computers and printers. It's our most popular drawing by far!

If you would like to download this file visit our web site.