I was perusing Hacker News the other day when I came across this blog post by a Matt Sephton. The post was about a famous (in various circles, at least) vector illustration of a Ferrari F40, original artwork by David Kimble, vector recreation by Dave Rumfelt. What a beautiful piece of technical art this is:
Mr. Septhon was kind enough to provide a scrollable version directly on his blog post, so that casuals like you and me can marvel at all the detail directly from the comfort of a web page—no need to fire up Illustrator or Preview. Here’s one screenshot of that detail. Just wow:
Please go check it out for yourself on the aforementioned blog post.
One aesthetically pleasing aspect of this illustration is that it is both very technical and precise, yet very human and hand-drawn at the same time. If you zoom in, you’ll notice that the curves are not perfect. You can tell somebody, a person (not an AI), drew it. It gives the piece extra warmth, character, and compositional interest. I don’t believe a 3D rendering from a model would look as nice.
And even though I worked as a software engineer at Adobe for 3 years on Illustrator, I wasn’t even aware of the drawing programs made by Canvas GFX. So, TIL, about 20 years late.
More on vector illustration later; just wanted to share this further. This motivates me to finish my previous vector illustrations, e.g., here and here. Thanks Matt for the blog post, Dave for the vector illustration, and David for the original.