Mustangs Illustrated: Interview With Automotive Designer Keith Kaucher
“Art isn’t always what you see, it is what you know.” My high school art teacher, Mrs. Olsen, would feed us that line when we were following a picture too closely and were losing the composition because of the details. For instance, it may appear that a shadow is darker, but if you make it that dark, you might lose the balance in the overall illustration.
Great artists don’t need to be taught such things, they just know. If it doesn’t feel right, it isn’t finished. Sometimes an illustration is never really finished, at least in the mind of the artist. But when a client is paying for a piece of art, it better darn well get to the point of “finished”. There is a fine line between production and creation. And Keith Kaucher knows that line.
Keith Kaucher is a technically accurate Designer. With a background in industrial design, for Keith, there are certain things that are important to completing an illustration. It has to be right. The proportions, the angles, the shadows, the forms. It is one thing to design a car that looks awesome. It is quite another to create a car that will fit actual human beings within its proportions, or moreover can even be built as it’s draw on paper.
