The highlight of recent SEMA builds has been working with top car builder, Keith Charvonia.
As a fellow Industrial Designer by trade, Keith and I often share the same vision and wavelength and is one of the most under-rated car builders in North America. Take a look at his site.He has appeared on Jay Leno’s Garage with his unique Kaiser Manhattan and the Scion Tuner Challenge Scion FR-S build which I worked on a couple of years ago
This year, Keith was creating his build on his trusty Toyota LandCruiser FJ60, a classic SUV in the making, as the main-stream begin to realise how tough these vehicles are. Speedhunters and Airraid were supporting him in the build process along with many partners.
INITIAL CONCEPTS
The original brief was to design a livery on a white base based around camo. Some reference supplied called out the Snow-Camo look which has been used often on various VW Group projects in recent years. I wanted to move this on a little, so we explored a few different approaches as you can see here.
Personally, I wanted to move this on from Snow-Camo a little and make the look our own. I’ve been quite interested in random geometric shapes across vehicles to give a sense of speed. You can see elements of this in my liveries for Corey Fergus and also Subaru Rally Team USA, but this initially didn’t work.
Keith mentioned a hexagon shape he was considering using and that sparked a thought! I reworked the design with chamfers and hexagons to create something a little more unique.
We developed the design back and forth and ended up as you see above. We wanted to utilise the lines of the truck, so you might notice the graphic removed from some of the body creases on the vehicle.
Next task was working out how this was going to be produced. We had little time, no available to scale drawings, a vehicle 1000’s of miles away from me and the end result needed to be super clean. I spoke to one of my clients, AERO who came on board straight away.
AERO produce PAINT film. Its applied like a vinyl wrap, but its actually paint. Its lighter than vinyl and paint and also as tough as paint. Colors and vibrancy really pop as well, so this was perfect.
Recent AERO wraps have included the US Bobsliegh team, the Rahal Letterman Lamnnigan BMW M6 and Indycars and the Michael Shank Racing Daytona Prototype.
One we had a design locked in, I played with various muted hues to get a nice transition from White to Dark Grey. Every day, Keith had another partner on board, so we had to incorporate these into the actual design, so they didn’t look added on. One of my other clients, Safecraft Safety Equipmentd also came on board straight away, so huge thanks to AERO and Safecraft.
Once signed off, I completed the Wrap file. This is different to the final design sheet as it includes bleeds, overlaps and annotation to aid wrapping the build.
AERO wrapped the Land Cruiser while Keith finished off the build and all went well. This image shows the transformation from original Toyota (off) white paint, shown on the roof and B-piller compared to AERO.
Once again, Keith has impressed massively with his build and I hope the livery goes someway to match his latest pride and joy.
A pleasure as always to work with Keith. Make sure you check out Keith’s site.
You can read Keith’s Trailhunter Build posts on Speedhunters here.
You can also go back in time and read about the creation of the Speedhunters Scion Tuner Challenge winning entry here.
