Modern Vespa

(cont'd)
here are a couple of detail shots after colouring...

...and here's a snapshot of the full artwork

That is awesome! I need to dress like that for our club's Dapper Ride!

I've a spare set of helmet goggles you can have, I never use them.

I bet the helmet would be huge on me as I wear an XXS. I'm down for the goggles though!

Outstanding!

Just checking if I can post

who said that..

Indeed you can. Now introduce yourself properly and post pics of your scoot. We like pictures.

Got inspired by the awesome people in our local scooter club and put this together.

This is how I see my red 150 Lx...

Nice! Looks a lot like the "Nuova Linea" logo, Piaggio presented with the P series back in the 80s…

I deconstructed the original For A Few Dollars More movie poster to create this image.

Nicely done! This is pretty great.

Great job! Like a swan Nice work! I'm a long-time fan of Leone's movies and their graphic style. The opening credit sequences are super cool.

Ha! Just noticed the smoke from Clint's gun has been moved to the scooter exhaust, nice touch

Here's a quick peek at what's on my artboard today. This is still a work in progress. Lately I've been making line art illustrations of speedo gauges, various types fitted by Piaggio going back to the 1950s. This particular format first appeared I believe in the 1960s and continued to be seen on Vespa smallframes through the following decades. The left of the image shows the vector linework and the right shows the full illustration.

exhaust's on the wrong side

we'll have the NSM posse kicking off

That's funny!

I was hoping nobody would notice that.

Anorak.

You spelt posers wrong.

It's not impossible have a posse of poseurs and potentially plausible imposters would be amongst the posse posing as poseurs.

Line art illustrations of old speedometers

Lately I've been making illustrations of early Vespa speedometer gauges. I'd been studying pictures of old gauges and these Veglia units caught my eye. Veglia was an Italian manufacturer of timing instruments and supplied many automotive companies including Fiat, Ferrari and Piaggio.

These drawings are based on speedometers that were fitted to various Vespa models beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. Part of the appeal for me was in the period typography used on the displays. The numerals seen on the clamshell shaped speedos are particularly distinctive. They appear to be set in a unique typeface and I could find no modern equivalent that matched. When making the illustrations I redrew all the numerals from scratch and I aimed to make the layouts as accurate as possible.

Once the layouts were in place I built up the drawings with black and white linework. Like an etching, all the shaded tones are created with overlaid lines. Colour tints were added after the black and white work was complete.

Here are some snapshots of the finished artwork.

These old speedometers seem simple by today's standards. No oil light or fuel gauge. No trip counter. They almost seem closer to timepieces than instrument panels.

Thanks for sharing all this. You really have a special talent.

I used to have the wasp lapel pin that you created. Alas I misplaced the jacket to which it was attached.

Thanks Max. I don't know about talent. Persistence, maybe.

This is epic stuff, sir. My hat's off to you.

Amazing art work. Looking at your speedo renderings made my day. I was not aware how interesting these designs were.

thanks! ^^^

You could say the project was an exercise in close study of those old Veglia speedos. While researching images I tried to focus on original parts, and I sifted out a lot of pictures of reproduction units. I saw how the number forms have degenerated over repeated reproductions, to the point where some of the poorer repro gauges now have type that is not even consistent across the span of the dial. The numbers I made here are fairly authentic, I think, compared to the originals.

Over the decades vehicle instruments seem to have become both more complex and more minimal. There's a lot more information on display on a typical instrument cluster now. Perhaps the typefaces, pointers and dials have become more simplistic to accommodate that extra data.

These three mid century Veglia examples are from an era where speedo design was already moving towards modern minimalism. If you look back to earlier car speedometers of the 1930/40s there are some really ornate designs with custom typography and decorated panels.

The most fascinating part (to me) is seeing your process. I love how you showed the technical aspects of your lovely artwork in the line drawings. Even better is the explanation of your research and description of what you focus in on. Thank you for taking the time to explain!

Here are some older sketches I ran into recently. They show the prep work for what became the DoubleGood logo.

The first pictures are quick pencil drawings. They're not modelled on any particular scooter, but drawn from memory and developed on the page. Just little thumbnail sketches, no more than an inch or two in size.

The next images are digital. A mixture of Illustrator drawings (vectors) & Photoshop sketches (rasters). To start the first one, I photographed one of the pencil sketches and worked over it in vectors. I think there was a bit of bouncing back and forth here between vectors and rasters until I was happy with the proportions and the perspective. I was starting to consider the tones at this point too.

The final work was all vector graphics. The linework was minimised in favour of solid areas of black and white. There was lots of fine-tuning here as the artwork progressed towards a single colour logo.

Here's another piece brought out from the vaults. We're coming up on ten years since this Modern Vespa logo was made.

In my old files there are a few branching attempts at a Modern Vespa logo. The project really gained momentum when the text was incorporated into an overhead view of a scooter. I used photographs of my own scooter as a general reference point.

This animation is assembled from the original work-in-progress files, and it shows how the design evolved through dozens of little iterations. What you see here is just a low resolution gif file. The actual vector artwork is super crisp and fully scalable.

That's really, really cool! I hadn't seen any of the iterations that went into it.

I am proud to display your fine work here on MV.

Great to see the genesis of the MV logo.

Drum hub illustrations

Is it massively nerdy to have a favourite ever Vespa wheel? Yes I think it is.

I've been making line art drawings of this old drum brake & wheel assembly. Various similar types were fitted to different Vespa models, but this particular five-bolt version, where the radial fins pass over the stepped edge of the drum hub, THIS is the one.

L'Unione Vespisti

Here's a new graphics project I've been working on. This was my initial line drawing. It's an early 1960s Vespa.

I decided to place the scooter inside a shield emblem and I settled on this layout. In this split image you can see the underlying lines on the left and the ongoing artwork on the right.