Small Projects, Small Drawings

Some recent drawings of some small residential projects.  Lots of design studies on yellow tracing paper.

Drawing Residential Interiors

A slide show of sorts...

I rarely do renderings of residential interiors. There are quite a few reasons for this. You're competing with client expectation levels conditioned by the virtual reality of CGI. I don't like doing them. The entourage is tedious, literal and fussy. If you're working over a photograph, every object has its own independent set of vanishing points (think 14 point perspective). People are a problem, along with pets and shadows). And ultimately, I don't think I'm particularly good at them. And the list just goes on and on. But since almost no one reads this blog, I don't really have to worry about that.

That being said, sometimes it doesn't matter what you think or like, you just have to do them whether you want to or not. This is part of a "design book" I put together for an interior remodeling "age in place" project that includes, among other things, a residential elevator (which is a great way to age in place, sans stair lift) and making the project ADA compliant. Everything else is just your standard interior renovation project with little in the way of added spaces but a complete refinishing and re-detailing of the interior with a substantial amount of new millwork, casework and trim.

All of these images were developed over photographs of the spaces to be renovated (you can see some of the setup images at the bottom of this post). This was particularly helpful here as the volume spaces could not be adequately described with interior elevations alone. All of the images were drawn in pencil and ink on yellow trace (yes, yellow) and then rendered with Prismacolor pencils and ChartPak AD markers on both sides of the media. 

There's a lot of repetitive drawing here. And since most of the design studies address multiple finish options in the same drawing, fully rendered images were never really the purpose of the exercise. Instead, "frames" were laid out where various color, material and finish palettes were described.

I heard someone recently describe the biggest problem with the overwhelming prevalence of digital CGI rendering as "it's led us to outsource our imaginations". One doesn't have to think, merely observe. I have a similar read in how it's conditioned us to make design decisions. There is a different level of ownership in understanding why you decide to do or not do a particular detail or feature. More traditionally or classically developed design concepts depend on profiles and proportions that are better understood when developed with hand drawings.