Paper Napkin Doodles

I suppose there are many readers of this blog who wonder about my qualifications for critiquing car designs.  Certainly from the experience standpoint, I'm leagues behind Automobile Magazine's long-time styling critic Robert Cumberford, who is a styling professional.  In my introductory post for this blog, I stated:

"As for my qualifications, at one point I considered making automobile styling a career. However, I came to realize that I didn't have the stuff to be outstanding in that field. At the University of Washington I stared as an Industrial Design major, a field that required a year of basic architectural design. But I eventually shifted and ended up graduating in commercial art. After serving in the army, I entered graduate school and ended up as a Ph.D. (from Penn) demographer specializing in developing population forecasting software systems. This gave me a more rigorous scientific/engineering mindset than my undergraduate training offered. Throughout all those years my interest in automobile styling continued and I followed developments closely. I leave it to you, the reader, to judge the quality of the articles I will be posting here."

Maybe I should have offered something more tangible.  For instance, whether I could actually draw cars and come up with designs.  The answer to that is: Perhaps -- at the advanced amateur level at best, even maybe just as a run-of-the-mill amateur.

I'll let you judge.  Above is a collection of ballpoint pen doodles I made recently on Starbucks paper napkins while having coffee.  Nothing fancy or refined.  Essentially the same sort of thing I doodled on margins of notebooks back in high school and college.

More ballpoint pen work here, but on a better grade of paper.  I made these sketches back in 2007 to illustrate a post on the old 2 Blowhards blog on the subject of continuity of brand details using Packard as the example.