The world has lost a true master of automotive cutaway illustrations.

      Jiro Yamada via Cinquecento Museum Shop

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      It was announced this week that Jiro Yamada, a Japanese illustrator renowned for his exceptionally intricate cutaways of vehicles and machinery, passed away last August at the age of 65.

      Yamada started his professional illustration career in 1979. His work encompassed a wide range of subjects, from motorsport legends and everyday cars to helicopters and rocket engines. He was hired to create renderings for promotional and technical materials for car manufacturers, as well as for enthusiast publications and private patrons. If you look through the official guidebook for the inaugural Gran Turismo, released in 1998, you’ll find Yamada credited for the illustrations.

      His website showcases a collection of his automotive art, neatly sorted by make and model. To describe it as impressive would be an understatement. This is a highly specialized art form, and the amount of research, planning, and accuracy needed to create one of these pieces is immense.

      Jiro Yamada via Cinquecento Museum Shop

      On his site, Yamada explains his process, using his illustration of a Porsche 906 prototype as an example, making it worthwhile to explore if you're curious about how one starts a cutaway of a machine as intricate as an automobile.

      According to a post in an enthusiast Facebook group, while Yamada succumbed to pancreatic cancer last summer, this information only became widely known recently. On August 7, just days before his passing, Yamada announced on Twitter that he had entrusted the Cinquecento Museum in Nagoya, Japan—a museum dedicated to the Fiat 500—with the responsibility of maintaining and selling reproductions of his many works.

      #みんなのラリーカーを見せてくれ 青春のランサー pic.twitter.com/bxLDnbuNAq— 山田ジロー（チンクエチェント博物館 管理） (@tisjiro) November 20, 2024

      In 2000, Yamada shifted to digital production, following a trend among his contemporaries—like Jim Hatch, who spoke with Road & Track in 2020. “Everything was done by hand,” Hatch, who began his full-time career in this field in 1991, recounted. “There were no computers. I would ink everything on a large board with a pen, and Kevin [Hulsey] would airbrush everything.” Technology certainly brought a level of consistency and efficiency that was previously impossible.

      On the surface, the challenge these illustrators face seems straightforward: portraying what lies beneath a car’s exterior as accurately as possible. However, there’s no single technique to fulfill that task, which is what elevates cutaways to the status of art. For Yamada, it was a means of “showing both the rationality and beauty of machines simultaneously.” We couldn't express it better ourselves.

      Is there an automotive artist that resonates with you? Email the author at adam.ismail@thedrive.com.