Small Cottages...

Paraline drawings, often referred to as "axonometric" or "isometric" drawings, are a method of abstract, plan projection three-dimensional drawing that sees less currency of use in the digitally drafted environment in most of today's architectural offices. Often referred to as a "poor man's perspective" due to their simplicity and ease of construction, it is increasingly rare now to see them at all outside of their occasional use in a classroom or studio setting. There are a variety of reasons for this, in particular the immediacy that digital drafting brings to quickly developing wire frame and photo-realistic 3D images of a project. I once worked with an architect who especially detested paraline drawings, his argument being that it was an underhanded, misleading means of three dimensional representation when you could spend the same amount of time developing "eye level" perspective drawings. But then again, he also hated rendered elevations, building sections and floor plans, especially if he was the one who had to draw them.

 

     

There was certainly an element of truth in his bias as foresight. I find paraline drawings to still be extremely useful and informative drawings, especially early in the conceptual design phase of certain types of projects. The most obvious "ease of use" feature is being able to work at a specific and constant drawing scale. Another is the "bird's eye" quality the drawings have, making them especially useful in providing an overview of a project that has multiple buildings or is a single building to be developed in phases. In essence, I have to try to think of the drawing as an abstract two-dimensional rendered site plan. I learned early on that paraline drawings should never replace what you learn about a project through true perspective drawing. But there is always an element of abstraction in any type of architectural hand drawing, be it in the form of strategically placed and rendered entourage, material representation, time of day or so forth. Paraline drawings embrace this concept as well by means of constant use of scale and the lack of convergence  to vanishing points common in true three dimensional perspectives.

 

 

In the drawings shown here, the purpose of the exercise is to provide an overview of a particular project that has an important interrelationship between two buildings and their obvious siting characteristics on a small piece of waterfront property. Big pond or small lake, tomatoe or tomato. It was drawn during the schematic phase and used in lieu of a site plan that was purely a plan drawing. It is a conceptual design study for a pair of small, seasonal, lake front vacation cottages on a shared lakefront site and was drawn at 3/16" scale while the project was in its earliest stage of design. Given that I already had a high degree of familiarity with the both the compositional and material qualities of the design and the unique "micro" qualities of the  site, I was able to develop and present this scale drawing in the schematic design phase as opposed to more conventionally drawn and rendered building elevations. Later drawings did present these elevations (and eye level perspectives) but as an overview of the project, this remained the most effective and frequently used presentation image.

 

 

The landscape entourage in the drawing foreground was used to emphasize a unique feature of the site, specifically the extreme grading that allowed you to climb up at the edge of the site and look down on the shared front lawn, assuming you didn't mind briars and thistles cutting your legs. While not defined by an actual, physical pathway, it provided an immediately recognizable reference point that offset some of the "paraline" qualities of the drawing. The initial drawing was conceptually developed in sketchbook form (see above) and then revised when the final site was selected.

       

 

Enlarged Axonometric View of Cottage One - 2012

See Image below for material and media.





Enlarged Axonometric View of Cottage Two - 2012

See Image below for material and media.

 

Axonometric View of Front Lawn - Proposed Vacation Cottages - Brown County, Indiana - Preliminary Design Study, 2012

3H pencil, Micron ink pens, Prismacolor colored pencils, Chartpak AD Markers on white tracing paper. Original Image is 22" x 11", constructed at 3/16" equals 1'-0"

Small Farm, Small Barn...

These are a series of design drawings done over the last couple of years for a barn project in northwest Mississippi. It's for a client built, multi-purpose barn to be built in phases that has gone through a rather gradual evolution in size and program. The site is a three acre organic farm that has milking cows, egg producing chickens and a limited number of free-range pigs as its primary livestock. The visual characteristics of the site are of a natural, non-cultivated landscape with north to south gradual down slope and a 1 acre wide by 3 acre deep footprint. The barn footprint is approximately 16' x 32' feet with cow shed and screened porch wings located to the sides. The barn is designed on a modular 48" grid and is framed with nominal wood posts, joists and rafters and has a stained plywood / wood batten sheathing as its primary exterior material. All of the materials required for construction are readily available at Home Depot and are easily pre-cut. The primary roofing material is translucent fiberglass panels. All first floor spaces are non-thermally broken and, except for the screened porch / greenhouse, are livestock occupied or used for feed / material / equipment storage. The second floor is partially thermally broken and occupied by the client for parties and sleepovers on an occasional / seasonal basis.

The first four drawings show the proposed barn in its latest permutation. Simplicity in modular framing, material (all nominal wood) and detail vocabulary were the design goals. Beyond that, the drawings are mostly about color and entourage. Farm buildings are especially easy to romanticize graphically, because of their obvious iconographic and picturesque forms and the opportunity to develop colorful and thematic entourage as framing elements in a drawing. These drawings try to explore the diminutive scale of the buildings and their internally illuminated qualities at night with a "storybook barn" narrative and use of entourage as their graphic theme. They were set up in 3H pencil on yellow tracing paper as simple, one-point perspectives with a drawn to scale elevation as the foreground picture plane. The pencil base on yellow trace was then inked over as the final drawing and rendered as described below. Always make sure the masking and application of the pastel wash is the last thing done to the reverse side of this type of drawing and that the drawing is tightly stretched and taped to the drawing board when applying. Use a low tack roll of drafting tape to mask the borders and internal edges of the drawing as well. You cannot trim masking tape or frisket applied to yellow tracing paper. Apply the drafting tape in strips and lightly tack the edges. Use a hand-held hair dryer (or just blow) to remove excess pastel after applying. Even still, the cotton swab applied pastel washes shown here remain unstable throughout the life of the drawing and will smear at lightest touch.  The main purpose of the pastel wash here was to facilitate the illusion of a night sky with graduated tones of grey. So...... you can also blow off the pastels all together, save yourself some major headaches and and do softer color pencils washes to render an "atmospheric" sky in the daytime suitable to your drawing.

The translucence and delicacy of yellow tracing paper as media for a time-intensive final drawing requires careful staging, especially when using so many different types of rendering media (in this case: ink / colored pencil / marker / pastel wash) to complete. While correctable in the setup and ink line work stages, the color rendering phase of a final drawing on yellow trace can be pretty unforgiving. Marker washes always have to be applied first. They can never be applied over color pencil washes. Markers are useful in establishing base tones that are then rendered over in colored pencils. Lighter marker tones that don't bleed or leave marker lines over large areas are best for these basic washes. Marker washes can also be applied without having the drawing taped down. With all other media, having your original drawing tightly stretched and taped is recommended, especially when trying to develop softer toned pencil washes over large parts of the drawing. When scanning the image, flat-bed or desktop scan only and place a clean piece of 11 x 17 paper between the drawing and the scanner lid. This both protects your original drawing and provides a higher quality scanned image. Incidentally, the color images in this post are photographed. Scanning will provide much more color vibrancy and are more easily manipulated in Photoshop.

The last three drawings are pencil and ink studies for an earlier version of the same project that had a more ambitious program in terms of size and complexity of material and were part of a complete set of rendered presentation plans and elevations. The original drawings are done to 1/4" scale on Bristol board which loves both soft and crisp pencil work but, being non-erasable in ink, also requires patience and a new appreciation of the limited application of Liquid Paper. And acknowledging that sometimes you have to start a drawing over which, remarkably, didn't happen here. The livestock entourage in these drawings are rendered to scale as simple outlines, a quick Google Image search providing lots of dimensionally accurate images to work with. Actual drawing sizes for all images are noted. 
 


Front Yard Elevation looking South - Proposed Barn for Esther's Day Farm - Olive Branch, Mississippi - 2012

3H pencil, Micron and "Sharpie" Ultra Fine ink pens, Prismacolor colored pencils, Chartpak AD markers and pastel on white tracing paper. Pastel and marker washes are applied to reverse side of tracing paper. Ink work and colored pencil is applied to the front side of the tracing

paper. Original image size is 11" x 17".

Rear Yard View looking North - Proposed Barn for Esther's Day Farm - Olive Branch, Mississippi - 2012

3H pencil, Micron and "Sharpie" Ultra Fine ink pens, Prismacolor colored pencils, Chartpak AD markers and pastel on white tracing paper. Pastel and marker washes are applied to reverse side of tracing paper. Ink work and colored pencil is applied to the front side of the tracing paper. The pastel was applied by lightly shaving a pastel stick over the masked image with an X-Acto knife and blending it in with cotton slabs. Messy but effective. The original image size is 11" x 17".



Enlarged View of Rear Yard View facing North - Proposed Barn for Esther's Day Farm - Olive Branch, Mississippi - 2012

See image below for media



Rear Yard Elevation looking North - Proposed Barn for Esther's Day Farm - Olive Branch, Mississippi - 2012

3H pencil, Micron and "Sharpie" Ultra Fine ink pens, Prismacolor colored pencils, Chartpak AD markers and pastel on white tracing paper. Pastel and marker washes are applied to reverse side of tracing paper. Ink work and colored pencil is applied to the front side of the tracing paper. Original image size is 11" x 17".



 

North Elevation - Proposed Barn for Esther's Day Farm - Olive Branch, Mississippi - 2010

Free hand Micron ink pens over 3H hardline base, rendered with H, 2H & HB pencil washes; "Sharpie" fine point markers on Bristol Board - 11" x 17" original image size




Transverse Building Section looking North - Proposed Barn for Esther's Day Farm - Olive Branch, Mississippi - 2010

Free hand Micron ink pens over 3H hardline base, rendered with H, 2H & HB pencil washes; "Sharpie" fine point markers on Bristol Board - 11" x 17" original image size



South Elevation - Proposed Barn for Esther's Day Farm - Olive Branch, Mississippi - 2010

Free hand Micron ink pens over 3H hardline base, rendered with H, 2H & HB pencil washes; "Sharpie" fine point markers on Bristol Board - 11" x 17" original image size

Small House...

A perfect project for a quick, hand drawn presentation on yellow tracing paper. This a 17' wide x 50' deep "zero lot line" single family house in Denver, Colorado. Zero lot line meaning the building engages the property line on two sides (front/sidewalk and right/alley) and has a very compact and specific set of planning requirements The preliminary design process looked at a series of one and two bedroom alternatives before deciding on the two bedroom scheme shown here which is being developed as a rental property. In an office environment, with a project this small in fee and scope, these may be the only hand drawings you do so why not make them count? The final design decisions where made with lightly constructed hardline 3H pencil drawings and then rendered as described below. The major building materials are a common brick veneer exterior (painted white) with stained cedar wood trim, doors, windows and eaves / fascias and an architectural shingle roof. It has a carriage house relationship with an existing 1890's residence on the western (left) side of the proposed site and develops both an urban and historically contextual parti'.

The drawings are all freehand ink (except for brick line work) over 3H hardline base drawings at 1/4" scale. Because of the inherent contrast, yellow trace is an excellent media for rendering wall surfaces in elevation with white Prismacolor pencils as long as the colored pencil is applied to the reverse side of the trace. This is done to avoid rendering over line work with a white pencil which is messy and rarely fun. This is also is true for most of the remaining color pencil work and marker washes on the quick design drawings shown here. One tip that may be useful is to show the brick veneer and roofing shingles on the front of the drawing as hardline ink work which is faster, provides a more consistent and delicate poche' effect and avoids smearing the line work by applying the heavy pencil washes to the reverse side. Final pencil washes for the sky and entourage were applied to both sides of the tracing paper as needed. Lighter colored pencil and marker for landscape and ground cover were applied to the front side of the trace to avoid being washed out by the masking effect that is common to reverse side application of lighter pencil and marker colors on yellow trace. The final image sizes are roughly 11" x 14" and 11" x 17" with portrait orientation, perfect for desktop scanning and inexpensive color printing.




Proposed Rear Yard Elevation facing Northeast - Johnson Residence - Denver, Colorado - 2012

3H Pencil, Micron ink pens, Prismacolor colored pencils and Chartpak AD markers on yellow tracing paper; Colored pencils & AD markers are applied to reverse side of tracing paper to protect ink work.




Proposed First Floor Plan - Johnson Residence - Denver, Colorado - 2012

3H Pencil, Micro ink pens, "Sharpie" Black Ultra Fine Point and Red Fine Point Markers,

Chartpak AD Marker and Prismacolor colored pencil with colored pencil and markers

applied to reverse side of tracing paper to protect ink work.



Proposed Front Elevation facing Bannock Street - Johnson Residence - Denver, Colorado - 2012

3H Pencil, Micron ink pens, Prismacolor colored pencils and Chartpak AD markers on yellow tracing paper; Colored pencils & AD markers are applied to reverse side of tracing paper to protect ink work.




Proposed Second Floor Plan - Johnson Residence - Denver, Colorado - 2012

3H Pencil, Micro ink pens, "Sharpie" Black Ultra Fine Point and Red Fine Point Markers,

Chartpak AD Marker and Prismacolor colored pencil with colored pencil and markers

applied to reverse side of tracing paper to protect ink work.



Alternate Elevation facing Bannock Street - Johnson Residence - Denver, Colorado - 2012

3H pencil, Micron ink pens, Prismacolor colored pencils & Chartpak AD markers on yellow tracing paper; Markers & colored pencil are applied to back of tracing paper to protect ink work and colored pencil washes

Hand Drawing, Portfolios and the Mythology of Blueprints...

Every once in a while, in the course of a renovation project or going through archives, you come across a really well preserved set of actual "blue prints" (white lines/blue paper), as opposed to the more common, recent and cheaper blueline prints (blue lines/white paper). Both methods of printing were a very good measure of linework quality on the part of the draftsman but architectural blueprints have an almost mystical quality that isn't just a function of their age. A blueprint is a "living" impression of a drawing, remaining sensitive to light and humidity throughout it's life. It's almost as if the linework was still breathing on the paper.

   

A blueprint image is so architecturally iconographic that it has it's own aesthetic vocabulary. Because of this it can be used as a "reverse image" presentation  or portfolio technique with certain types of hand drawings by scanning the image and editing a few color and exposure settings in Photoshop or PhotoFiltre. The right type of hand drawing is important because the tonal representation is reversed in the image and emphasis can shift or be lost. More minimally rendered pencil and ink drawings with expressive line work seem to work best but digital manipulation can overcome some rendered elements in reverse imaging so a little experimentation goes a long way. The type of project for using this technique needs to be considered as well, as these first two images show.

Pretty major swing in scope, right? The first image is an 8-1/2" x 11" pencil, pen and ink drawing on white trace for a small, new house on Martha's Vineyard; the second, an 11"x17" ink, pencil and marker drawing for a large-scale mixed used project in Boston. The residential image was reversed imaged into a blueprint as part of the original presentation. The small scale of the project and it's drawings, along with the vernacular design concept, make the "blueprint" imagery very effective here. The images printed beautifully at 11x17 on very high quality, heavy weight presentation paper. The next two images below are from the same project...

  
A "blueprint" of an 8-1/2"x11" pencil and ink drawing of the rear view...



An alternate study of the street view. The drawings work very well as reverse images because of the emphasis on expression through line work and subtle use of pencil tones for shading and selective transparency. All of these drawings were intially developed as black and white images with very subtle shading, the linework being the most effective means of communication. Try scanning a couple of linework drawings with minimal shading and see if this technique works for you. A sympathetic client or critic with a romantic view of architecture (or architects) is a great audience for this.

Drafting Room Disasters, Part Two...Spray Fix & Spray Mount

Reminiscing about tape dots the other day started me thinking about other drafting room disasters in the days of hand drawing and architectural offices where pretty much everyone actually drew as part of their daily routine. Except for the spec writers. While tape dots mostly provided opportunities for drawing wounds of the self-inflicted variety, spray fix and spray mount really opened up the playing field for team efforts in trashing a drawing while also leaving the field open to the occasionally spectacular solo effort. Weirdly enough, the origins of almost all spray fix and spray mount disasters lay either in their flammability or the near identical appearance and labeling of the cans. Or both.
 

When pencils and vellum ruled the roost in most drafting rooms, aerosol cans of spray fixative next to a drawing board were a fairly common sight. Spray fixative has a lot of uses but was typically applied very lightly to finished pencil drawings on drafting vellum and tracing paper to prevent smearing and fuzzing of line work. The most popular brands were (and are) Krylon and ChartPak. For architects and draftsmen who still do many drawings by hand, spray fix remains a very useful and relatively safe tool. It's cousin (or bastard step-child, depending on what just happened to you) was spray mount, an aerosol can of supposedly low-tack adhesive primarily used to mount drawings, photographs and, more commonly, blueline prints to sheets of foam core board, usually with varying degrees of success. The "low-tack" qualities of spray mount varied from brand to brand and even can to can but the incredible flammability of spray mount and spray fix were rarely in question and often amply demonstrated. This at a time when you could smoke at your drawing board. Of course, at this same time, you could also smoke in restaurants, in bars, on airplanes, in taxis and, believe it or not, hospitals and elevators. Sometimes even in a hospital elevator.
 

There was one time when I was working in a drafting room where I had to quickly mount several blueline  prints to foam core board using spray mount. With larger prints and the usually futile attempts at a bubble or wrinkle free application of print to foam core, this was usually a two person job. But not for the ambitious or the lazy. You would put down a pretty heavy coat of spray mount on the foam core and then let it rest for a minute before applying the print, mainly to avoid bleed throughs. Sounds simple enough, right? So after applying a very liberal coating to a 2' x 3' piece of foam core, I took it out of the print room and put it on my drawing board to rest before applying the blueline print. As I went back to the print room to hose down another piece of foam core, out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the partners heading into the drafting room. A partner who also happened to be a heavy smoker, the kind that could smoke, talk, eat, drink, draw and criticize all at once and never touch the cigarette. Since I was mounting these drawings for him and he was heading towards my drawing board, paying closer attention might have been a good   idea.                                                                                                                                         

Right about the same time that I crossed the print room threshold I heard this "whump" noise followed by a "whoosh". You know, the same noises you hear when you throw a match from ten feet away on a barbeque grill that you doused with way, way too much charcoal fluid. Like maybe a whole can. This was all accompanied by a disturbingly intense flash of orange light. Well. The partner, with the ever present cigarette dangling from his mouth, had stopped by my board to see how his mounting was coming. Anyone who's ever smoked knows that what often falls off your cigarette isn't just ash, it's red hot little embers. And that's exactly what happened here. Basically, he dropped a tiny piece of burning coal onto a piece of paper covered styrofoam saturated with the aerosol equivalent of gasoline, producing predictable and momentarily horrifying results. After a second or two the partner, minus his eyebrows (fortunately he had already lost most of his hair), had the presence of mind to yank the burning foam core to the floor and start stomping on it while in the shadow of a "to scale" mushroom cloud we had both helped to create. But the best was still to come. Anyone who has ever seen styrofoam burning knows that, when on fire, it sticks like napalm. Especially when you stomp on it. Who knows, maybe styrofoam and napalm share the same DNA since they are both petroleum based products. Ultimately, I didn't know what was funnier; his missing eyebrows, our burning brogans or the fact everyone else just kept on drawing. The absence of a modern sprinkler system probably helped in this case, but at least we got the fire out before OSHA showed up.

That cans of spray mount and cans of spray fixative often looked and were labeled almost exactly the same (see photos above) always baffled me. This could really lead to problems. The necessity of spray fix as an essential drafting tool made a lot of sense given the instability of graphite as a drawing medium. It was usually applied as the final touch to a linework intensive drawing before running it through a diazo (ammonia based) blueline machine. Blueline machines had two sets of glass rollers, kind of like those cheap fluorescent light bulbs. You ran your drawing (laid over the print paper) through the first set for exposure, then ran the print paper only through the second set for developing. Imagine feeding a dollar bill into a coin changer or vending machine, except in this case your dollar bill is three feet wide. Blueprint machines were probably the single greatest source of drawing destruction in any office I ever worked for. Big, stinky, ammonia fueled destroyers of drawings that smelled like a diaper pail om a hot day. But add in a drawing mistakenly drenched with spray mount, as opposed to spray fix, and you can probably see where this is going.

At this same office with the now eyebrow-less partner, there was an older gentlemen who had taken me under his wing. By older I mean really old. His career as an architect had begun when FDR was president so he had a lot of talent and knowledge to pass on and that I was all too grateful to receive. Architectural drawing was both our shared passion and language so I would go out of my way to reciprocate in passing on to him the latest drafting room innovations. Like spray fix. At first my friend didn't "hold with it", usually with a muttered comment or two about "Rube Goldberg inventions". One day, after completing a particulary time and graphite intensive sheet of wall sections, I was surprised to hear my friend ask to borrow my can of spray fix. Without looking up from whatever I was doing I grabbed the can and tossed it over my shoulder. My drawing board was right in front of his, proximity being helpful in mentoring. Since I had seen his drawing develop over several days I also threw in "There's a lot of lead on that drawing. Better give it a really good soak." If only I had given him spray fix.

What I had given him was my nearly identical can of spray mount which he proceeded to apply very liberally all over his beautiful and about to be blueprinted drawing. He literally may have just used a paint roller dipped in model airplane glue. Since you always handled a finished drawing by the edges when printing, the coming disaster was not immediately apparent. My friend went into the print room and fed his drawing into the blueprint machine. And literally nothing came out. Courtesy of wayward tape dots, this was not an uncommon occurance but was usually accompanied by sound effects like the loud crumpling of paper (your drawing)and really colorful swear words. Never by, as in this case, complete silence. This time, what happened was my friend had fed into the print machine a drawing that was basically coated in glue which then proceeded to permanently laminate itself to one of the glass rollers inside the print machine. Nice, nice. Not only did a really beautiful drawing disappear in less than 5 seconds, so did the 40 or so hours it took to create it. I know this because that's how many hours of overtime (unpaid) it took me to do my friend's drawing over again, which seemed like an appropriate punishment at the time.

You would think that this might have led to an outright ban on spray mount in this particular drafting room, but it didn't. It did, however, lead to a few new rules and improvements, such as an outright ban on smoking in the office and, of course, a new blueprint machine. Even better was the installation of an automatic emergency defibrilator in the drafting room. Whether this was done as a reflection on the average age of the partners and their work force or in anticipation of future disasters (or both), I never really knew since it was quite awhile before either would speak to me beyond the occasional monosyllabic grunt. My older friend did remain my friend and his recounting this story later became a featured routine at office Christmas parties. But even now, everytime I pick up a can of spray fix, I think of my friend and smile.

Small Projects, Part Two...Breaking the "Fourth Wall"

My previous post on drawing small projects focused primarily on larger scale scale elevations and quick perspectives as "stand alone" images. Part of that "stand alone" quality is both deliberate and compositional in nature and part of it is the graphic limitations of Google Blogger in presenting drawings online. It was also a reflection of the purpose of the drawings, primarily the initial exploration of design concepts and the use of these drawings as a more effective presentation tool than purely digital images. Small projects also provide many opportunites for the use of composite drawings as a presentation tool.

Composite architectural drawings have a fairly simple definition. They combine multiple drawings (plan / elevation / section or plan / perspective) into a single composition. While primarily used as a design presentation device, good compositional skills can and should inform the production of working drawings, digital or otherwise. But that's a story for later. Maybe.

Composite hand drawings have a rich history in architectural presentations, especially in a pre-Bauhaus context. The most famous and influential examples that leap immediately to mind are the drawings that Marion Mahony-Griffin did for Frank Lloyd Wright's Wasmuth Portfolio. These are some of the finest architectural drawings of the 20th century with Mahony-Griffin's combination of plans and perspectives into single composite images being especially beautiful and effective. The relentlessly axial, formal nature of Wright's plans and elevations lent themselves well to the Beaux-Arts presentation method of composite drawings. But it was Mahony-Griffin's preference for perspective in lieu of elevation and her superior drafting and entourage skills that really set the Wasmuth drawings apart and made them so influential.

The drawings I am showing here are by no means Wasmuth-worthy, but then again, so little is these days. The beauty of small, historically themed projects is that their limited scope often allows exploration of drawing techniques (like hand-drawn composite images) that larger, more contemporary projects (or your office) may not support. This project is a small pool house addition to a large venacular residence on Nantucket Island. I had the benefit of already drawn AutoCAD plans and existing condition photographs to draw over in composing and executing the drawings. The most effective component of these drawings is the use of perspective instead of elevation to convey the exterior design concepts. Perspectives, from a client or critic's point of view, trump elevations everytime.

The original size of these composite drawings as drawn and presented to the client were 24" x 36" with the plans drawn at 1/8" scale. The perspectives are compositionally treated as overlay images on the drawing with implied paper edges, tears and curling graphically represented as part of the image border. They are drawn in ink on white tracing paper and rendered on both sides with Prismacolor pencils and ChartPak-AD markers. Three separate schemes were presented, the small scale of the project helping make this level of study and rendering possible. For presentation purposes, the drawings were printed at full size and the perspectives were also printed as larger images at 11 x 17. Borders on inset images are not always necessary, as controlled fade outs with landscape, color and good linework also can work well in over-all drawing composition and technique.

Small, traditional projects like this lend themselves well to highly personalized drafting styles. As with most traditionally oriented projects, good material representation through drawing begins with the quality of line work. Bad line work is often most glaringly obvious in plans and elevations, the most commonly used of architectural drawing types. When perspective drawings are used in presentations, an emphasis on quality in mere "orthographic" drawing is often diminished or completely ignored. Graphically insensitive and rigid IT-generated pen maps have a lot to do with this, but unimaginative, "task only" oriented CAD managers / operators do as well. Good hand drawing in architecture, especially orthograhic drawings like plans and elevations, is fundamentally an exercise in abstract representation and depends on quality line work and good composition. While this is inherently true in perspective drawing, it really becomes apparent in successful composite architectural drawings.

There is an expression actors frequently use called "breaking the fourth wall", where they address the audience or the camera directly, sometimes as part of the script, sometimes not. Composite architectural drawings that utilize perspective frequently embrace this same basic concept. As a communication tool, the superiority of perspective imagery to merely orthographic drawings is obvious. The use of perspective as part of a composite drawing breaks the "fourth wall" of an orthographically generated script and provides a much greater degree of understanding on the part of the audience, in this case your client, colleague or critic. A good composite drawing can be a purely orthographic drawing exercise with the immediate juxtaposition of plans to elevations heightening the understanding of both. They can also be very supportive of and reinforce design elements like formal or axial symmetry. But small projects allow you to immediately explore and develop compositional drawing techniques you can then apply to your larger projects, traditional or otherwise. Composite drawings can still be accomplished through purely digital means. However, developing an understanding of compositional drawing by hand will improve the quality of your presentations, digital or otherwise.

Small Projects, Part One...

　

Small Projects, Part One...

I love small projects, pretty much of any type, but especially small residential projects of a classical or historicist orientation. Elevation and sectional design drawings are especially fun to draw and can often be done at the same time as, and assisted by, CAD drawings. From a design drawing standpoint, the limited scope of small projects (depending on your definition of small) allows you to combine schematic design and design development into a single phase, letting detail observations and refinements made with hand drawings credibly inform and influence the broader compositional design elements at an early stage of the project.

There are lots of reasons for this, at least from a drawing standpont. In broad terms, the small size of the project immediately allows you to conceptualize and render at a scale larger and more dimensionally and profile driven than "schematic" scale. You start out at something like 1/4", 3/8" or even 1/2" scale which, especially on traditional and classically themed projects, require a detail-oriented approach to conceptual design. They also, like large scale projects with a similar parti', require a high level of attention to craft, usually worked out with large scale, profile intense drawings. This used to be slow and mostly enjoyable process in pencil, but impossible to justify with the availibility of quick, simple AutoCAD underlays to trace over. These first drawings I show here did a little of both. It took less than a day to draw and render all three of them as a small part of a presentation for a much larger project. They're drawn at 1/4" and 3/4" scale on white tracing paper (any 12" roll is fine) over basic CAD underlays that established running floor and framing datums, wall, roof and center lines and brick coursing to trace over. As a rule of thumb CAD is also great used as a tool for use making underlays with drawing borders, north arrows and other graphic information to freehand over.

After these first digital steps, it is an all pencil, ink and marker exercise. Design elements like window fenestration, dormers and eave, wall and stone profiles were resolved and layed out in 3H pencil and inked over in free hand with Prismacolor Premier Fine Line Markers, .02 & .005 (www.pismacolor.com) and Pilot Razor Point II fine line pens (www.pilotpens.us) Drawing pens are always a matter of personal preference and style. I like these pens for their excellent sketch and hardline qualities. I also really like their ability to take Chartpak marker and colored pencil washes without smearing or blurring linework. You will find this very useful when you render later in color. Landscape and entourage elements are all quick, free-hand and fairly loose. Later posts will provide more discussion on color rendering on translucent white or yellow tracing paper. The fun in rendering on trace, because of its transparency, is the ability to work both sides of the paper with color and line work.

Elevations, as drawings, lend themselves to much livelier presentation by hand than their digital counterparts. Much of this depends on the quality of linework and how shadow and color are used and rendered. Shadows are, like linework, a huge part of depicting foreground / background elements and changes in plane in rendered elevations. By using simple plan projection methods to create consistent shadows, they really are an essential element in using elevations as an effective presentation tool. 3D sketches  present more varied and complex opportunities for the use, or non-use, of the selective rendering of shadow. Again, the transparency of trace allows many opportunities for subtle layering in drawings like this.

These are quick black and white sketches (all around 8-1/2"x11") on white trace, all drawn in a single day for a very small house on Martha's Vineyard. I rendered a series of quick sketches by hand over photographs of the steeply sloping site. They were drawn freehand in ink over a hardline pencil base study. Drawing over photographs is a theme we will definitely return to here. But for now, these drawings illustrate a larger point. These are "charrette" drawings, all done in a relatively short period of time in a drafting room context. They have digital or photographic assistance at points, in the interests of speed, but are purely hand made. Drawings like this not only afford a greater level of intimacy in communication, they are inexpensive and faster to do with higher rate of return in their effectiveness as architectural drawings than digital images produced in the same amount of time.

The idea that hand drawing is less efficient as a design or presentation tool than purely digital drawing doesn't bear out here.  If it sounds like I'm making an economic argument in favor of hand drawing, well, perhaps a little. At the same time, hand drawing rewards in different ways. The graphic vibrancy of well made hand drawings on small projects still trump purely digital images everytime, especially with small, historically themed residential projects. And they're still more fun to do.

Tape Dots and Other Drafting Room Disasters.......
Anyone who has ever spent a lot of time in a drafting room bent over a drawing board is probably all too aware of the amazing number of opportunites for disaster, both self-inflicted and as part of a larger group effort. In today's drafting rooms, disaster is usually digital in nature. Not saving a copy of your drawing before revising it, refusing to comply with the IT department's neanderthal pen maps and "is this a virus?" or "my computer just crashed" are among the more popular and frequently used excuses. But, courtesy of back-up files and flash drives, these wounds are rarely fatal. Annoying, yes, and sometimes funny, but rarely fatal.

However, when most drawings were done by hand, you really spread around the talent pool for genuinely spectacular and occasionally fatal (to the drawing and your job) screwups. Pinbar drafting and vacuum frame / diazo ammonium printing were a rich minefield for drafting room wags and comics. Leaving layers out, printing layers backwards or, best of all, inserting the wrong layers in a drawing AND printing them backwards were the most common and laughable errors. Anyone who ever had to revise six layers of mylar to move one door on a plan probably remembers pinbar drafting and wonders what the hell they ever did to the partners to warrant such punishment. I certainly know I did. But for me, the comedy of self-inflicted drawing disasters really began with tape dots.

All draftsmen know, and some of us love, tape dots. Sticky little suckers and they don't taste that bad either, especially when used as a substitute for nicotine gum. You can stretch a drawing to your Borco tighter than a snare drum and it will still be that way when you come to work the next day assuming, of course, that your office has air-conditioning. Tape dots hate humidity, among other things. I had already been drawing for awhile before I got my first box of tape dots. My father the architect was, as they say, not a big fan. They were expensive and fussy, compared to plain old drafting tape. I, on the other hand, didn't have to pay for my tape dots, so I was an immediate convert. No more avoiding the edges of a drawing because the drafting tape would curl up and snag on my parallel bar. No more fuzzing my pencil lines or smudging my ink work because the drawing wouldn't stay tight and flat. Drafting heaven, right? Not exactly. Tape dots, like so many commodities, are perishable. They don't age well. The older they get, the less they stick. To my drawing board, anyway. The underside of my parallel bar, my triangles or, for that matter, my coffee cup and clothing were another story altogether.

Tape dots do curl. They lose their bite. They are especially fond of graphite and really, really like sharing it with the rest of your drawing. They don't detach easily from anything but mylar and who the hell draws on that anymore? If you draw frequently on something like, say, yellow tracing paper, this can be a bit of a problem. Once they're on your tracing paper, getting them off can be like trying to pull up a piece of plastic laminate from a kitchen counter-top. With your fingernails. Once a tape dot or two has leeched itself to the underside of a parallel bar, well, to the unsuspecting or just plain tired draftsman, the collateral damage to their drawing could be quite disagreeable and, on more than one occasion, terminal. Ever see a blueprint with the ghostly image of what is obviously a piece of Scotch tape starting from a corner and meandering it's way down to the middle of the drawing over some weird, squiggly line? You guessed it. Tape dot disaster, which never really seemed so bad until it happened to your drawing, one you probably liked very much and had spent a lot of time on. Or, even worse, really hated doing and now had to do all over again. In many drafting rooms, the sound of ripping paper followed by a shriek and a litany of really foul four letter words was usually a reliable indication that a tape dot had struck again.

The first time this happened to me, I realized that printing tape dots with the ubitquitous smiley face on them was a really bad idea. The suicide rate for draftsmen would have gone through the roof. I still, believe it or not, love my tape dots but don't need them smirking at me while they help me trash a drawing I'm fond of. They are also wildly inconsistent. One time, in an office I used to work at, I put a large drawing I had done up on the wall with tape dots. I later left the firm and, after a few years, came back for a visit and that drawing..had...not...moved. I know this because the paint behind the drawing was lighter than the adjacent wall surface. Or, who knows, maybe they couldn't get the tape dots off and just painted around the drawing. It wasn't even that great of a drawing. Either way, tape dots do love their drywall.

Finally, tape dots are hardly evil. Like everything else, including draftsmen, they have their strengths and weaknesses. And the weaknesses are easily overcome with one or two simple steps and a small measure of diligence. The obvious solution is to give yourself a few inches of buffer from the final border of your drawing to the edges of your paper, letting the tape dots do their thing and gobble up your corners. Then, as the final step, take your drawing up and trim to your final image size. Even now, every time I tape down a drawing I am reminded of one particular irony. Once, upon being spotted by the head draftsman while I was setting up a drawing with a few extra inches of paper margin to each side to give the tape dots their due, I was upbraided for "wasting money by wasting paper". As if the cost of the paper somehow outweighed the cost of re-doing the drawing when the occasional disaster inevitably struck.

Somewhere, a tape dot is smiling.......