I have to say that I just love cutaway illustrations, those wonderful glimpses of the workings of cars, aircraft, ships, machines, buildings and other complex objects in which the artist has granted the viewer the gift of x-ray vision.

Nashville based freelance illustrator Holly Carden creates some particularly nice cutaways of buildings, both real and imagined.

Her intriguingly complex buildings like “Macabre Mansion” and “Murder Castle” feature literary references or ties to actual events. Her blog features posts that give background on many of her illustrations, as well as detail crops, in progress images and process information.

Her most complex illustrations appear to be drawn in traditional media (pencil and ink), and then scanned into the computer for digital coloring.

Carden also does maps and more straightforward cartoon style illustration.

If the home page of her website looks more like an eCommerce site, it’s because two of her cutaway illustrations have recently been made into jigsaw puzzles. These are available through her online store, along with prints of some of her illustrations.