Kevin Wassink, a student of mine, is a gifted digital painter and concept artist. Inspired by his style (see drawing on the left) I asked him to make an artist impression of the CBX.

His texts and stages below illustrate the creative process; his 'making of'.

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Reference Stage

The first step in making this artist impression was looking up some good references of the CBX Inox. I haven't seen the bike in real life so I had to do some studies into the complex parts of the bike.

Picture by Juliette Laurant.

Thumbnail Stage

The second step, after research, was deciding the general mood and scene in which the CBX Inox would fit. So I started off with a field of quick sketches with different scenes. The general thought behind the thumbnails was a deserted post-apocalyptic scene.

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Stage 1

None of the thumbnails were perfect so I combined the best elements of some of them into a new sketch. The elements I went with were: a vertical piece, an industrial setting, a central placed bike and a dark, post-apocalyptic mood.

Stage 2

After getting most of the black and white values right, I started on choosing a colour palette that would make the scene look dusty and deserted.

Stage 3

Throughout the process I kept on readjusting the lighting and colours. At this moment I wasn't happy with how some of the buildings were starting to look like, so I took a step back and redid them later.

Stage 4

At this point the base level of the piece was done, so I started working my way from the back to the front adding the first level of details. Adding more atmospheric perspective for more depth.

Stage 5

Slowly I worked my way to the middleground and made some visible destruction to add to that deserted look I was going for.

Stage 6

To add some extra detail in the foreground I imported some textures to save me the work of manually drawing every brick.

Stage 7

While I had been busy drawing the scene, I also had been drawing the bike with some reference pictures. I made a rough version at first to get the shape right, then filled in the details to a certain level.

Stage 8

The base of the bike was done for now so it was time to get it merged into the scene. So I used more atmospheric fog and colours from the background to bring the two together.

Stage 9

Some more colour correction was done. I also added some water to get more contrast in the foreground.

Stage 10

Uptil now I wasn't really happy with how the clouds were looking so I redid them from scratch and they made the piece come together. I redid the water in the foreground and added even more detail in the foreground. The hole in the building didn't quite work so I made some adjustments there as well.

Final stage

It was time to add the last details on the bike and cleaning up the piece.

Click the drawing to enlarge the end result.