A young French nutritionist was in my kitchen asking for a food processor. We don't have one, and I told her she'd just have to make do. "Make do"? How is that expressed by the French? Improviser. When confronted with less than optimal circumstances, most humans will fashion tools from whatever is at hand. Folks seeking employment in the 30s arrived at the desert canyon of the lower Colorado to work on the Boulder Dam. Unemployed, European-trained craftsmen created terrazzo floors with Native American-inspired patterns, fashioned hundreds of cubic feet of copper cabinetry and machined colossal valves and fittings in exchange for a pull on these big, concrete teats. Despite heat, primitive living and scarcity of everything but rocks, these workers were making do, big time. And so were their bosses: Kaiser, Bechtel, et al.
Leaving Arizona on US 93 brought us down to Black Canyon, an area that, save for the Colorado River at its bottom, is seemingly all rock and bereft of water. It's so close to the expanding basin-and-range province that one is easily disoriented by the pull of seismically-warped gravity. It just feels different there. We crossed over the Hoover Dam, an ambitious engineering design built under extraordinarily brutal economic and climatic circumstances. In this desolate corner, how celebrated can such a structure be? Can something requiring such calculation and cooperation be an unembellished industrial object? Or is it crafted to make our spirits soar? We crossed over and sketched for a while from a pullout halfway up from the dam road. I was a goner! I made this drawing and swore to come back and draw the whole thing, inside and out. The next year I did.
In its useful, static role, the horizon is an arbiter of space; assign it a numeric value in a perspective drawing, and one can draw in objects with believable proportions. In its metaphysical role, it's a tool for reflection to an observer. Go deeper: it's the edge of time on which we balance as we walk our lives, unrolling and revealing what only time will tell.
I like to use concept sketches early on, when data and design are often incomplete. Sketches align expectations and solicit approval among any number of stakeholders. Their rough nature says, "work in progress." They invite input and allow flexibility going forward. Sometimes this quote from the 1989 Batman comes to mind when a client's expectations are too high. It's a thrill to promote a unified vision based on data from varied sources, and to follow a project's development until it goes to bid. Save the full rendering for when project data, modeling tools and time are available to truly solve the design gaps. A renderer may find the archive of hand-sketches helpful to make a finished product.
At the factory or in the mountains, how great it feels to get one's line-of-sight directed heavenward.
Take a look at this floor plan. Absent close reading, it seems like a nice idea. Once in the door (at the bottom,) one can choose between watching some big-screen content in the lounge/snack area at the right, or sitting down at one of the tables at the left. The smaller spots on the floor must be the chairs.
Progress sketch of nuclear material
Continuing with the white-on-black investigation, I relapsed in the Dept. of Subject Matter. The human figure is much more pleasurable to draw, but I like the technical challenge of doing buildings in reverse light.
A freehand exploded plan oblique sketch made with layers of trace and printed using ARC Reprographic's old-school, blueprint machine before they sold it for scrap! Now this look is available on the styles menu of Sketchup. Using its line style menu, one can probably get this hand-made feel as well! 
In addition to the mysteries made visible in this Vince Collins spot, another early influence for me was exploded illustrations of mechanical parts, cars and engines. My dad worked for GM and car imagery was never far from reach. In the early part of my career, I had the pleasure losing myself in the making of these, both ruled and freehand. The best were for Austrian architect Hanns Kainz'projects.
As counterpoint to describing buildings with black dusty marks or vector-based lines on white paper, I started painting from a live human with wet media -- white paint on black paper. What a reversal! Volume informed by light alone. Good brain exercise.
These two hummingbirds appear out of proportion with their nest now. They seem to be making a joint effort just to stay upright! Tiny when first hatched, they must have felt so protected in there. Soon time to leave home.
Is this more deep than the last photo? Just because of the trail width? The bike tracks? These scenes are hard to translate to the flat surface in a drawing or painting. Is so much foreground necessary to draw attention to the far distance? What we see in this photo is already an optic translation of 3D to 2D. It doesn't convey how "deep" this felt to me as I experienced this space. As a means for discussing comparative sense of depth in 2D, this photo works.
Can you imagine how it might have felt to think about recording, narrating or depicting places of importance or sentimentality before there were railroad tracks or engineered walls? It's tempting to think what cave paintings might tell. Despite there being nothing linear in this photo, it still has depth cues. Could one formalistically seek depth cues in ancient images? Let's not go there today.
Seen flat, it might be a painting from the 1950s. When given a minimal depth cue, it might be sculpture from the late 1970s. Or a cookie sheet.
The current batch of perspectivists at UC Extension recently reverse-engineered some photos. Reverse engineering is the process of analyzing a subject system to create representations of the system at a higher level of abstraction. A photograph is a representation of the system of perspective construction. The camera uses a station point, line of sight and picture plane; it has a field of view and focuses along a line of sight. These geometric abstractions are common to both perspective and still photography. Our perspectivists located abstract components in the photographs and roughly sketched out plan versions of the scene the camera most likely faced.
The whole process reminds me of staring at the rainy-day illustration on the Morton Salt container. A girl was holding an umbrella and a container of Morton Salt, which had the same illustration with a smaller girl, smaller container, with yet another illustration of a girl with an umbrella and an illustrated container. Or so I imagined.
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| 2009 LHS webcam vs. 1845 Turner sunrise |
Something came up with a project that was illustrated last fall. I pulled up the images and the hills were all golden brown. None of that! They're green now.
Drawings in this post are random examples and bear no relation to the architect or developer in this narrative.
