It sounds like the beginning of a slightly ridiculous question. For British artist Nick Veasey, it's simply part of the job.

Best known for creating extraordinary X-ray artworks that reveal what lies beneath the surface of everyday objects, Veasey's work occupies a fascinating space somewhere between photography, science and art.

But when the subject is an entire 1986 Dodge Ram — complete with cowboys — things become considerably more complicated.

So, rather than simply showing you the finished artwork, we thought we'd take a look behind the image and discover how one of Nick Veasey's remarkable X-rays actually comes to life.

Every Nick Veasey artwork begins with an idea — and then comes the rather more practical challenge of finding everything needed to create it.

For 1986 Dodge Ram Cowboys, that meant sourcing the truck itself before Nick could begin the process of looking beneath its surface.

A vehicle is a perfect subject for Veasey's work. Remove the paintwork, badges and visual distractions and an entirely different kind of beauty emerges: chassis, suspension, engine, seats, steering and thousands of individual components suddenly become the image.

It's an idea that sits at the heart of Nick's work.

Traditional photography records the light reflected from the outside of an object. X-ray does almost the opposite, allowing us to see its internal structure — what something is, rather than simply what it looks like.

Nick has described X-ray as an honest scientific process because it reveals how things are actually made.

Not in one go.

The Dodge Ram was X-rayed empty and in a number of separate sections. Those individual images could then be brought together to create the finished composition.

It's a process Nick compares to completing an enormous jigsaw puzzle.

Large subjects require numerous individual X-rays, with different areas demanding different exposures depending on their density. The resulting films are developed, scanned and painstakingly assembled digitally to create what eventually appears to be one seamless X-ray image.

And this isn't happening in anything resembling a conventional photographic studio.

Nick built his own specialist X-ray facility so that he could experiment and refine the process. Radiation dictates almost every aspect of how he works, making the environment, equipment and safety procedures an integral part of creating the art.

The result is part photography, part science and part digital craftsmanship.

X-Ray

Rather than photographing the entire subject once, Nick creates a series of individual X-rays, carefully adjusting the process according to the density and construction of each area.

Develop

The individual X-ray films are developed before being scanned at extremely high resolution, preserving the extraordinary levels of detail captured within them.

Rebuild

Finally, those individual images are digitally stitched together. Gradually, the pieces of the puzzle become one seamless image — revealing the subject in a way we're simply not accustomed to seeing it.

Nick has worked with the V&A using essentially this process, where multiple sheets of X-ray film were stitched together to form seamless finished images.

Hundreds of decisions. Multiple X-rays. One extraordinary final image.

Discover the piece in more detail here >

There is, however, more to Nick Veasey's work than the technical achievement of producing an X-ray.

The technology allows him to challenge the way we normally look at things.

We're surrounded by surfaces designed to influence us — colour, packaging, branding, fashion and appearance. X-ray strips much of that away.

A beautifully polished car becomes engineering. Clothing becomes construction. An everyday object that we might barely notice can suddenly reveal an extraordinary complexity hidden beneath its surface.

There is also a wonderfully democratic quality to Nick's way of looking at the world.

Remove the surface and many of the things we use to distinguish one object — or one person — from another simply disappear.

It's why Nick's work can feel scientific and strangely beautiful at the same time.

He's not really photographing what something looks like. He's asking us to look at it differently.

Nick's route into X-ray photography wasn't part of some grand artistic plan.

Working in photography, advertising and design, an opportunity arose to create an X-ray of a cola can for television.

Nick had no established X-ray practice at the time. But the experiment led him to begin exploring what else the technology might reveal.

He subsequently learned from radiographers, hired access to X-ray equipment and gradually developed his technique. Eventually, the limitations of hiring machines led him to construct his own specialist X-ray facility, giving him the freedom to experiment properly.

More than two decades later, what began as an unusual photographic experiment has become an instantly recognisable artistic language.

Nick's work has subsequently encompassed fashion, flowers, musical instruments, motorcycles, cars, aircraft and the human form.

Creating the X-ray image is only the beginning.

Once the individual exposures have been developed, scanned and assembled, Nick has an extraordinarily high-resolution master image from which his finished limited-edition artworks can be produced.

His current classic X-ray editions are produced using ChromaLuxe, where the high-resolution image is transferred onto metal using dye sublimation. The deep blacks and extraordinary clarity of the resulting surface can give the finished artwork an almost illuminated quality — despite there being no light behind it.

Nick also works with other processes, including lenticular artworks that change as the viewer moves past them.

Once you know what goes into creating them, it's difficult to look at a Nick Veasey artwork in quite the same way.

What appears beautifully simple from across a room can be the result of numerous individual X-rays, specialist equipment and hours of painstaking work — bringing science, photography and art together to reveal a world we're simply not supposed to see.

Discover our collection of Nick Veasey limited editions online or visit Startle to experience the remarkable detail of his work for yourself.