Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Get your 1920's on.....




Or your Sear's House. Depends on your drawing vocabulary preferences, I suppose. Sears & Roebuck were the largest home builder in early 20th century America with their famous "Houses by Mail". At their high point they employed over 500 architects and draftsmen to keep up with market demand and an ever evolving product line. Their sales catalogs had a very distinctive graphic style with lush entourage and highly romantic, picturesque views with lots of Arts and Crafts influences. They were almost always composite drawings, rarely used elevations or building sections amd always used the plans to compose the lower half of the drawing along with a small sales pitch house descritpion / narrative and beautiful hand drawn graphic fonts. So in the spirit of that exercise...
This is a design development study drawing for an addition and remodeling of a very small, early post-World War One cottage on  Boston's North Shore, in a neighborhood of similarly cute cottage houses with a "plan book" feel. Sometimes you think you've dodged a bullet time-wise by sticking with grey tones for something that's supposed to be quick and timely. Doesn't always turn out that though, but I have always loved composite drawings.
Pencil and Ink on stretched buff tracing paper with ChartPak marker and graphite / Prismacolor pencil washes. And a surprising amount of Sharpie, applied to the reverse side of the drawn image, as always.
Copyright 2017  David Barrett McTyre