Australian artist Alex Gabbott made this cross-section illustration to show us what’s inside those annoyingly-deadly Sentry Turrets from the Portal 2 game. Unlike his previous cross-section piece–Bob’s Burgers–which was mostly digitally-painted, Gabbott wanted this piece to be as authentic as the ones in the Incredible Cross Section books. He drew and painted this piece mostly by hand, with some additional post processing on the computer.

Snip from the description of the creative process:

I got 185gm hot-pressed watercolour paper, which I then cut to A3. Prior to painting, I constructed a solid animation lightbox for about $70AUD, which I then used to trace my rough layout onto the watercolour paper. I then inked it, then painted it in watercolour paint. Because it is inspired by a video game, I was able to use Valve’e 3D model viewer to make it as accurate as possible. The final step was to scan it in, clean it up, and add annotations and shadows.

You can buy prints and T-shirts of the illustration, here and here.

You can watch a timelapse video of the entire ‘making of’ process, after the jump.

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