You have pined your entire life for a poster featuring a 1989 Toyota Corolla All-Trac. But you also have a thing, weirdly, for the Scion xD, a car nobody ever loved. And a Lexus SC300. And a Toyota Prius Prime. And a brand-spanking-new Toyota 4Runner TRD Pro. But no one was able to give you all of these things, on a poster, together. Until now.
Artist Darren Zayman just completed a two-year project to draw all 269 body variants of every single Toyota ever sold in the United States, and even a few that may not have been sold here. Or, as Zayman put it in an email to us, “there are a few that might not have really been sold here (Toyota Sports 800, FJ45 Troopy) but maybe they were. Even the really boring cars are on there. Ugh. Each illustration took a couple hours or so... do the math. I don’t want to.”
Every Toyota. Every Scion. Every Lexus. All of them. And thankfully for those who appreciate a little personal flair, some of the variants come in modified versions, like this incredibly tasteful example used for the extremely good Lexus IS300 Sportcross (one of which I own, full disclosure of my own biases):
And here’s that Corolla All-Trac I mentioned earlier:
And a Toyota Previa, because why not.
Somehow, some way, Zayman truly captured the soul of a Previa. That thing looks exactly like every single Previa I have ever seen. All of them come in that color, even when they are not in that color.
Zayman, a 42-year-old web designer, began his frankly insane journey almost 20 years ago, when he started drawing every car featured on his website that sold parts for rear-wheel-drive Japanese cars, which started as ToyotaReference.com. But since drawing is in the blood, “for fun I would just choose random Instagram profiles and do a 2nd version of each car that matched their car... then gift it to them.”
And faced with his new website, ImportArchive.com, Zayman has begun an even larger quest. He aims to illustrate every single Japanese car ever sold in the U.S.
Yes, you read that right.
Every.
Single.
Japanese.
Car.
But since merely drawing every Japanese car ever sold in the U.S. is nowhere near enough of a herculean task, he’s also scanning, uploading, and sharing “EVERY US-market brochure for Japanese brands, plus a huge commercial archive (9000+, yeah 9000!), plus historic paint codes, etc..”
He’s uploaded about 2,200 brochures so far, has another 1,000 brochures in his possession that he’s in the process of uploading, and needs about another 2,200 brochures to complete it. To that end, he’s hoping to find other people who might have a couple brochures in their own collections to help him complete the archive. It’s not just brochures, though. It’s spec sheets. Paint codes. Even every single TV ad.
The Import Archive basically seeks to be the world’s largest Japanese car reference library.
And now that he’s done drawing Toyotas, the automotive drawing obsession doesn’t stop. Zayman has moved on to drawing every single Nissan, Datsun, and Infiniti ever sold in the U.S. He’s gone nine of them down, and has a mere 177 to go. Plus, he’ll even draw your own personal car, if you want.
Want the big Toyota poster, though? You can get it right here.