Architecture: Draw your landscape and buildings

Joe, I wonder if you'd like to help me co-write a few tips for my young fans on designing and drawing buildings, if you get a few minutes. Anything you can pass along would be a start!

Joe Mashburn: Sure, where would you like to start, this is a really broad subject.

C Lue Disharoon I'm sure! Maybe start off in two parts...a book or site you recommend...some notes from your own learning process...i'm trying to think of how to apply it to illustration. But you never know: you might launch some kid down the path towards architecture! Tanks.

Joe : I would start with "Drawing with the right side of your brain"
also "The Old Way of Seeing" . These are great books about design and creativity. Also "The Field Guide to American Houses" is a book about the evolution of houses in Amerca.

Two great Institutes are the American Institute of Architects and the AIBD (look at there websites). They help self regulate our profession. They also promote creativity and inspire and challenge us to be the best in our field through competition. They keep us current in our field though continued education. I have learned a great deal by participating in these oranizations, paricularly the AIBD.

Two big influences:
my dad, a contractor and my boss. He took great pride in every part of his job. I love to work with him because he would always callenge me to learn more.

Also Robert Noble taught me how to think multi-dimentionally (if that is a word). He taugt me to think outside the box and to challenge institutional thinking. He also taught be to build practical, a practice abandoned by alot of modern designers. I can go into more depth some other discussion.

How Illustration applies to this:

If I was selling you my house, and I described it to you in an e-mail, you would never by it, because the discription woud be so complicated. Or if I were telling you how to build it, you would quit after the first chapter becaus of the complexities of it.

But if I could draw it, I could show you the brick color and pattern. you could see how the lighting accents the fascade. Not only could I tell you what it looks like, but how to accomplish this.

Also, you can see how things come together such as the elctrical, plumbing and mechanical.

For instance, we all know water and elecrticity make for a bad comination. If I told you to put a Pane and a sink in the same room, that just sounds crazy, but if I showed you locations and showed you that the sink is really a mop sink, this would make things more obtainable.

We understand our own Ideas after we have drawn them. we can see how things fit.

If I were putting a shopping center on a 1.5 acre lot. I know I need the building and parking. I need to figure the most bulding i can that would allow the most parking I can. Using a ratio I can determine the building size and parking lot needed for the building.

CLue: Wow. Multi-dimensionality is not only a deep story concept in my "Not Another Comic Book" but I see I should (and have) favore layouts accounting for scenes containing several representational layers (I'll post some) so that the writing and art themes reflect one another. In its physical architectural instance, I want us to always create our outsides remembering they house the insides, and WHAt is inside should be at work whether it's depicted or not. I want them to be strong at carrying out dramas laid out inside actual homes/ buildings.

These things fit into imagining an entire world around your characters.

Joe: We'll talk more about it later.

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