Operator's manual — original car art
Petrol & Ink

Car blueprints, drawn as drawings.

A blueprint is a way of looking at a car that a photograph cannot manage: it shows the parts you never see, in the order an engineer thinks about them. Four of them here, white linework on deep cyanotype blue, each answering a different question about how a car is put together.

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Rear-Engine Study
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The short version. Most car posters show the outside of a car in nice light. These show the inside, the layout and the air, in the visual language of a drawing office. They suit people who like machines for how they work rather than for how they look, which is a different customer and a different wall.

Four drawings, four subjects

Rear-Engine Study is a cutaway of a 1960s rear-engined coupe with the engine, gearbox and suspension drawn in fine white line. Putting the engine behind the driver changes everything about how a car behaves, and a cutaway shows you why in a way no photograph can: you can follow the mass sitting over the back axle and understand the handling without anybody explaining it.

The Roadster, to Plan is drawn patent-style in three orthographic views, side, front and plan, on engineering blue. This is the oldest convention in the book and it survives because it works: three flat views give you the proportions of a car with no lens and no flattering angle involved.

V8 Anatomy opens the bonnet. A muscle-era V8 drawn in detail above the car it sits in, so the relationship between the engine's bulk and the body's proportions is the whole picture. If somebody has ever described an engine as the reason they bought a car, this is that sentence as a drawing.

Aerodynamica is the one that is not about parts at all. Cyan streamlines flowing over a wedge-era silhouette: the wind tunnel drawn as the thing being studied. Air is the last invisible component in a car, and this makes it the subject.

Where blueprint art works

These are the pieces that end up in offices and studies rather than living rooms, which is worth knowing before buying one as a gift. The blue is dark and cool, so it fights a warm room and it sits comfortably next to a monitor. A black frame is the natural pairing because it continues the linework rather than interrupting it, which the wall stage goes into.

Detail is the other consideration. The linework on all four is fine, and it only really rewards you from A2 upwards, where you can read the hatching from a normal standing distance. The wall sets out what that means for a given wall.

Related ways of looking

If it is the reduction rather than the engineering that appeals, the minimalist line work takes the opposite route to a similar place: one line instead of hundreds. If the appeal is the machinery under the bonnet specifically, the workshop and barn scenes put the same interest somewhere oily rather than in a drawing office. And your own car can be redrawn this way from a photograph through the Paint Shop, which has a blueprint style.

Pick the picture.

Open an artwork to compare its available formats, sizes and prices.

Questions, answered.

Are these real technical drawings of real cars?
No. They are original drawings in blueprint style, of machines that do not exist as production models. There are no manufacturer badges or model names on any of them.
What size does a blueprint print need to be?
A2 or larger, if you want to read the linework. The hatching and the fine detail are the point of these four, and at A3 you lose some of it from a normal standing distance.
Which frame suits blueprint art?
Black. The frame continues the drawn line rather than interrupting it, and the cool blue ground fights a warm wood surround.
Can my own car be drawn as a blueprint?
Yes. The Paint Shop has a blueprint style: upload a photograph of the car and it is redrawn as white technical linework on cyanotype blue. The preview is free and you accept it on screen before paying.

Next

Art deco car art →

For about fifteen years in the 1930s, the people drawing cars and the people drawing skyscrapers were chasing the same idea: speed as a shape. Streamlining, stepped geometry, sunbursts, chrome lines going nowhere in particular. Four pictures from that agreement.

Try it

Upload a photograph of your car, pick one of nine styles, and review the result before ordering. Three free previews a day, verified email and no card.

Try it on your own car

Or the photograph itself, printed as it is