Buick Vision Concept

Once again, I was inspired to create a one-box design of the future. I sketch these for myself since I don’t get nearly the number of views and likes for these designs compared to performance car models. I get bored styling minor variations on familiar proportions. I like to shake things up once in a while.

I started with a simple sketch of mine that combined soft and shear forms. I cleaned it up in Adobe Photoshop. As usual, I generated versions of it in Vizcom then continued to refine it in Photoshop by re-proportioning the design, improving the line work and reflections, plus adding details. I had the best results this time with Vizcom using the Palette: Pastel. I’ve included the reference image that I used in Vizcom.

I ‘borrow’ wheel designs from renderings and photos to save time. I have a massive iPhone photo album of cars for inspiration that I found on NetCarShow.com, Behance.com and Pinterest. I’m always looking for something I haven’t seen before by scanning through these while I’m watching tv.

I also ‘sampled’ elements of the rear from the Fordzilla design I included in my last post. I purposely left the color of those areas as is to make a contrast to the body color areas. The idea was that the surfaces in glass and steel form a shell which is truncated at the rear for aerodynamics exposing the more raw mechanical underpinnings.

Midway through this design exploration, I realized that the belt line from my original sketch looked too much like that of the Pontiac Rageous show car, an unfortunate exercise in styling reach during the Wayne Cherry era. (I remember one journalist thought a more appropriate name for the car was Diculous). I resolved the problem by creating an undercut below the belt line that maintained the graphic that I wanted but without any resemblance to the Rageous.

I decided to brand this concept as a Buick since the forms and delineating lines are graceful and flowing which I associate with Buicks.

I generated AI videos with ChatGPT’s Sora and Runway ML on a version of the featured image. Surprisingly, Runway proved to be the better option for quality results, whereas Sora distorted my design beyond recognition. I combined my favorite 2 videos by using the video merger tool in Adobe Express.

I created a layer from a still frame of the video and overlaid it on my original featured image in Photoshop to add more punch and drama to the finished rendering. I’ve included the before sketch at the bottom of this post.