Beyond Architectural Illustration: 2020

Tuesday, August 25, 2020

COLOR DEMONSTRATION

Long ago I created this tiny pastel sketch of a church. I called it “Burning Church” for obvious reasons and filed it away.

Years later I was playing with ideas for “landmarks” along Broadway in New York City, and realized that my “Burning Church” might work on a site at the north end of Manhattan on 170^th Street.

In designing the church I ran with a simplified gothic style with a blank base raising the sanctuary above the street level.

I then built an Autocad 3D model and tried out a number of viewpoints. This hidden line view was chosen for the final drawing.

This magic marker sketch gives a preliminary idea of the values I was aiming for.

A base drawing was produced using freehand ink on mylar.

The final drawing was 30” x 40”, so there was plenty of room for detail and texture.

Reproduced above is a color wheel. It shows the full range of colors going around the circumference, with saturation going from the center of the circle (desaturation = grey) to full color saturation at the circle edge. This is fully discussed on the outstanding “Gurney Journey” blog.

The original “Burning Church” sketch uses a very tight range of yellows and browns marked by the diamond shape of the color wheel. The sketch derives its strength from the limited palette.

The last color sketch above and accompanying color wheel show a complimentary palette ranging from yellow to blue. The combination of color contrast and value contrast makes the tower pop out strongly.

The last color sketch above and color wheel show an orange to grey-green palette. The color contrast is less strong, and the value contrast is created with a tower running from light on dark at the bottom to dark on light at the top. I’ve always loved the red-orange contrast with a grey-green sky; it reminds me of a portrait trick of contrasting warm flesh against a grey-green background.

The two sketches above have low saturation color palettes. Essentially, they are low contrast grey studies with pastel tone here and there.

The strong blue and yellow sketch above is going in the right direction, but seems a little bit too simple.

By adding a graded reddish tint top and bottom I pushed the focus to the center of the tower suggesting a cross composition.

The sketch above was done full size with pastel and pencil to study the detailed coloring of the church entry.

And here is the final art (30” x 40”). Note the darkened foreground and sky which adds to the drama and makes an excellent background for the white line elevations and plans. The final was done with transparent ink airbrushed on a photographic print of the ink line drawing. The title was done with white acrylic applied with (tiny) brushes. The ghosted plans/elevations/sections and quotes were color pencil.

Detail at the bottom of the painting.

Detail at the top.

Sunday, May 17, 2020

Composition Demonstration - The Ellington Building

Note: This demonstration uses geometric patterns, including the golden section, to work out the composition of an architectural illustration. These patterns are NOT some sort of minor god to be followed blindly or exactly. They are visual “crutches.”

__________________________________________________

Most renderings of architectural projects are done on a tight schedule. The building is modelled, the view chosen, and the composition of the image settled with a quick sketch.

With more time you can rethink the composition at every step of the process. The following project demonstrates this process.

In my ongoing “hobby” of designing new “landmark” buildings along Broadway in New York City, I came upon a fine site facing north toward Straus Park, a small landscaped triangle at the intersection of Broadway, West End Avenue and 106^th Street.

The most notable feature of the park is a bronze 1913 statue of a pensive nymph that commemorates the deaths of Isidor Straus and his wife, Ida, who perished together aboard the “Titanic.”

In designing a high-rise for this site, I decided to play with a setback tower in the Art Deco style of that era. I worked out a rectilinear plan set onto the trapezium-shaped site with the rest of the block a pocket park. A geometry of circles and arcs informed the setback locations.

Both elevations above (E/W & N/S) were developed from geometric forms reflecting the plan geometry.

Above, a massing block from the early AutoCad block model.

Above is a series of preliminary perspective sketches of the principal viewpoint.

The four views above are AutoCad viewpoints from 106^th Street (looking east and looking west), from Broadway looking north, and from West End Avenue looking north. I did not expect to find a “money shot” for the final art in these views, but it is best to explore all the angles if you have the time.

Above, a “worm’s eye” view (for the fun of it).

Above are three possible views looking south across Straus Park. The first seemed too flat, the second too distorted, but the third felt just right (hat tip to Goldilocks and the Three Bears).

With a range of views available, I decided to create value studies in pastel of a number of them.

Although several of these pastel studies worked for me, the last had the drama that I favor.

Above, a hidden line perspective view of the complete model.

The same view rendered in different styles in Accurender.

Above, top, the preferred hidden line view with context and greyed reflection. Above, bottom, a pastel sketch over line print. Just to see what a straight rendering might look like in a double square format.

It is fun playing with a single image that has lots of compositional possibilities….

But wait, there’s more!

I often paint a multi-image “composite” board when I design something for fun. Most of the time it is of a high-rise on a vertical oriented board: pretty straightforward.

This time I thought I’d try a vertical building on a horizontal board.

In balancing multiple images on a single board, composition can be rather complicated. The focus is sometimes lost, and balancing the various secondary images gets tricky. On a horizontal board the vertical building is even more likely to be lost.

Below is a series of pastel sketches showing the main drawing which will fill the final board and function as background for all other drawings. Each variation uses a different geometry to explore the shift to a “composite” board.

The first three variations didn’t have enough space for all the secondary drawings I wanted to include, and the last image was just too expansive. In desperation I roughed out an idea which included trees in Straus Square to the left, and the corner of a building that would show up in the right foreground.

Rough as this was, it seemed a good direction to explore, and I worked it up in AutoCad, Accurender, and finally Photoshop. The sequence of permutations below ends with the final art.

This raw Accurender image places the line drawn elevation of the building entry on the right.

Here the trees and sky are Photoshop layers to facilitate adjustments and change.

The building plans/elevations are creating a frame at the bottom and left edges.

Shade and shadow have been added to the building entry elevation on the right, and the building geometry lines are floating before the central image (green lines).

The line drawn plans/elevations are desaturated and faded. An after-rain mist is on the street, and the elevation of the building top is now in the upper right corner. A golden section based board geometry in red is layered on the image.

The same image as before, but with a different board geometry in red. Note that the perspective image at the center of the board has black line detailing that helps it stand apart from the rest of the board images.

________________________________________________________________________

Here is the final art. As you can see, the secondary drawings have been uniformly faded into the background while remaining legible. Meanwhile, the central image has been strengthened with color saturation and value contrast.

I was and still am satisfied with it, but there were probably a dozen other approaches that would have been as good.

Again, the use of golden section or any other compositional geometry is a tool, nothing more and nothing less. Training your eye to see (and then hide) patterns, as well as simple repetitive sketching, is more important.

Other posts on composition can be found: