This was a very special request from my good friend Janie Hermann who was recently advertising a program at Princeton Public Library, a part of which involved a shredder truck, which would come to shred bulk paper and sensitive materials in order to prevent them from being seen by unintended eyes, but I imagine also as a way of recycling paper. At any rate, when I read “Shredder Truck” all I could think of was a huge black rig running though the streets at midnight with heavy metal guitarists all riffing at each other in a wild cacophony, all with their Marshall Amps turned up to 11. So I replied to the post with the idea, and the next thing we knew, it was an idea for a sketch.
Because of the shape required to properly render a tractor trailer, this is the first drawing in this image to break the square format for these sketches. I won’t do it often, but I’d rather break the format on a special sketch than keep the format and break the image. Also, because of the detail in this sketch, please consider taking a look at it full size.
In Inkscape, I got the 4 shredders and the tractor itself separately from MorgueFile and bitmap traced them. I created the trailer using the rectangle tool, converted it to a path, and roughed up the shape a bit with the node tool. I worked to overlap the 4 shredders and have their color and tone fade gracefully into one another. I created the moon with the ellipse tool and blur effects. The rear wheels of the trailer are a copied and modified set of the back wheels of the tractor.
I hope you like the image. I love the nighttime feel, the dangerous color scheme, and the visual volume of the shredders. Thanks to Janie for the spark and the request!
