Longtime readers may remember when I mentioned Scott Robertson and his Photoshop bicycle renderings in October of last year. Though I am not by any stretch of the imagination a car guy (longtime readers will know that as well), I recently picked up a copy of Scott’s new book titled “Start Your Engines.” The book is full of great sketches of land vehicles, the vast majority of which are motorized. I like Scott’s drawing style, especially the looser sketches, so I enjoy looking at all of the work in this book. Of course, the reason I bought the book in the first place is chapter 1, which is devoted to bicycles.

During the last 15 years or so, Scott has worked with several companies in the bicycle industry including Kestrel, Bell Sports, Raleigh, and Rock Shox. The book shows a few iterations of a Kestrel frame design as well as several variations on his concept bikes, which have been circulated widely on the web as the fictitious Specialized Venom line. Personally, I would have liked it if more of his bike design work had been included in this book; only 10 pages are devoted to bicycles. Still, I am not disappointed with the purchase. All of the drawings are nice, but the “snowcraft mechanimal” sketches stand out as my favorites. I would recommend this book to other designers interested in transportation or to anyone interested in the thought process that goes into creating products. You can find out more about this and all of Scott’s books on his website.

Another of Scott’s recent projects may interest some of you. He has a series of DVD rendering tutorials that are sold through the Gnomon Workshop. In one DVD, he takes the viewer though the process of creating a photo-realistic bicycle rendering in Adobe Photoshop. I haven’t seen the DVD, but it sounds great. If any of you have already seen it, let me know what you thought.