Can architects and designers *really* design in Procreate, or is it just a glorified digital sketchbook? In today's tutorial for architects, designers and students, I demonstrate the "super powers" of Procreate that make it the ideal choice to imagine your design, develop it in scale, then hand it off for further development in Rhino or Sketchup. What makes Procreate such a powerful design tool is that it combines the best of both worlds…
Good things really do happen when you expect them the least.
For years I’ve been on the lookout for good ways to explain the advantages of designing and rendering by hand with Procreate, versus traditional designing and rendering by hand with pencil on paper. I haven't found the exact right words yet, but I keep looking.
Then this morning I woke up and saw on Twitter that the cartoonist Gary Larson was starting to cartoon again. He retired from drawing "The Dark Side" about 10 years ago, but according to this announcement he was starting to draw again-- for fun. Not the deadline-based, cartooning with which he entertained the world for 15 years, but drawing for his own amusement. Naturally my interest was peeked! But then it got better.
In today's masterclass, I show you how quick gestures with Procreate brushes can be all you need to create compelling concept design renderings full of life and energy
In today's masterclass, I show you how designing with sketches can give your ideas the time and attention they need to grow, bringing your client into the creative process, as opposed to shutting them out with the false promise of half-baked photorealistic concept designs.
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This is the shortest, easiest to read blog post ever written about watercolor. The idea is to get you over the hump and painting within minutes. Why? Because you are a procrastinator and you know it (or you wouldn’t have started reading this article instead of painting yourself) So start reading and I want to see that paint fly. Ready, go.
WHY SHOULD I WATERCOLOR?
Because it’s a really cool thing to do, and its fun, and you’ll feel really good about yourself. Plus it helps you see the world around you and become one with the moment. And did I mention you’ll have a little painting to be proud of and keep for your grandkids?
A little painting to be proud of and keep for your grandkids
WATERCOLOR IS A TOOL
Watercolor is a tool for seeing…and communicating…and other stuff, too. If you think of it as a tool, you are less likely to think of it as something precious and hard-to-do and any of the other excuses you’ve come up with before deciding this is the day to begin. On the other hand, if you do think of it as a tool you are more likely to lend it to a friend who will never return it, or leave it out in the rain at a friend’s house and get your dad all mad.
WHAT YOU NEED
You are going to need water, paint, a palette, a brush, and some paper. If you don’t have these already, go get them at an art store. What helps make this book so short is that I don’t tell you which brushes or colors or paper to get.
Just kidding…see list below where I tell you what to get. The next couple of photos show you the set up I use when doing watercolor architectural renderings, just so you can see I'm not making up that I use this stuff.
Another little painting you could keep for your kids, come to think of it
Here's one example of how the palette and brushes described in this post might look in the real world. Notice the paper towel and strips of scrap paper used to test the color and opacity of the watercolors I mix before painting
BRUSH: get a nice brush with a nice pointy tip and around a size 8.
PAINTS: get a tube of cadmium yellow (T), yellow ochre, alizarin crimson (T), cadmium red, French ultramarine blue (T), Prussian blue, burnt umber, sepia, winsor violet, hooker’s green, and sap green.
PAPER: Buy a small watercolor “block” which means a pad of watercolor paper that is sealed along the edges so the pad keeps the top sheet from warping. Get a small size for starters, say about 6 x 9”.
PALETTE: Get something with enough little paint holding areas for the paints above, and with bigger, shallows areas for mixing the color you want.
COLOR THEORY
Color is simply…well…actually there have been a ton of longer books written about color. For our purposes, color is what you are trying to copy from life onto an empty, terrifying little piece of expensive paper, with no guarantee that you’ll ever show the result to anyone, using only some strange liquid in a tube, a little brush and some water.
BUT SERIOUSLY
One word: triad. Believe it or not, you are going to use the theory of the color wheel and the color triad to make your little paintings. The color wheel is easy: It consists of three primary colors (yellow, red and blue) spaced equally around a “wheel.” Next come the three secondary colors, located between the primary colors, and created by mixing the two primary colors on either side of them. In other words, red and blue make violet; red and yellow make orange; and yellow and blue make green. Never mind for now that you can’t get every green or every orange or every violet you’d like to get from mixing primaries. But the reason we call the primaries chosen in this book a “triad” is because they have become known over the years to artists as producing the nearest misses in trying to get all colors. They are particularly good at getting there, especially with the help of the few secondary colors we throw in to our shopping list in the previous chapter.
PALETTE
Once you understand the basics of the color wheel, it is helpful to have a plan for how to access these colors. I use the following approach to laying out my palette (see photo below, and photo of real-world palette above). Basically, I just distribute the colors in the order they appear on the wheel around my rectangular palette. The idea is to keep opposites across the palette from each other, and to keep your palette as clean as possible by having similar colors close to each other. That way any splashing that occurs as you mix colors won't overly-pollute the colors next to them.
MIXING COLORS
The best way to introduce the idea of mixing colors is to have you mix the ugliest color: gray. (We're going to mix abut 50 shades of it, so make sure you're in a safe place.) Why gray? Because gray is what you get when you mix opposites on the color wheel. Mixing gray will help both your understanding of the color wheel and your understanding of another concept: color temperature. What is color temperature? It's the degree of warmth or coolness found in a color, usually having to do with the amount of red or blue found in the color. But we get ahead of ourselves. Let's try mixing some grays.
In the examples below, I have you use four different pairs of colors generally thought of as "opposites across the color wheel" to create grays. For those of you who like lists (and who doesn't?), those color pairs are:
Burnt siena and Cobalt blue (known as a "sedimentious" pair for reasons I'll discuss elsewhere)
Yellow Ochre and Windsor violet
Cadmium red and Prussian blue (a dye-based or "stain" based pair, because of the extraordinary staining power of Prussian blue)
Burnt Umber and French ultramarine blue
Each of these pairs, when mixed with more or less of the warm color with respect to the cool color, is capable of producing a warmer or cooler gray. Each of these pairs also produces a subtly different gray which, with practice, you will come to know exactly when you want to use. To get started, create an arrangement that features each color in its own small area, then a larger area of the mixed gray between them, with the warm color more dominant on one side, and the cool color more dominant on the other. I chose the silly configuration below, but feel free to use any kind of shape you please. I'll be sure to note your design when I see it posted to your Pinterest page.
Seems simple, right? That's because we haven't done greens yet. Greens are a whole other ball of wax. I once heard someone say that green is the most difficult color to mix because everyone--whether they are an artist or not--knows the right green when they see it. That makes sense when you think about it, because we've all spent our lives in Nature, where Mother Nature reminds us each day that this green is for Maple leaves, this green is for grass, and so on and so forth. It just permeates our brains. But wake up one day and see the two greens switched and even a baby knows something is wrong. For that reason we will stay away from mixing greens.
Just kidding. Below is your exercise for beginning your life long struggle to mix the right greens. Its so complicated that I won't even try to describe it in words, although I have helpfully labelled each of the greens in the exercise below. Just imitate my exercise first, then bust out on your own. The important thing is: keep mixing greens all your life and you may--just may--get one right someday.
Thanks for getting this far. When I originally published this post I was using Squarespace 5, then Google began pushing people to use mobile-friendly Squarespace 7* and I switched over. During the transition some writing and images were lost, so I am rebuilding the original post as time permits. Stay tuned for updates, and thanks for reading this far. Here, in the meantime, are the remaining photos that accompanied the original post.
Used to be I did about 7 hours of public radio a day. Then something happened. (No, I didn't "get too bummed out." I mean, yes, I did, but that wasn't why I left.) I discovered blogs and realized it was a lot more useful to get my news curated by intelligent people (so long as the blogs were from moderates from both sides) than to wade through the NYT or WSJ every day (or feel guilty I wasn't).
But clicking back and forth between blogs in my browser got a little tiresome, too, so I went to Google Reader. (You aren't using Google Reader? Really? OMG, are you gonna love the time you save w/ Google Reader:-0.)
Anyway, Google Reader is great, but you gotta read it, and as any practictioner of architectural rendering techniques and waterolor techniques knows, you can't be reading stuff AND getting stuff done at the same time. The answer?
Podcasts. Which ones? Well, you gotta choose your own, but if you're like me and you have the following genes: artist, tech and wantrepreneur, then you're going to love these:
Just start there and if you don't enjoy, let me know and I'll come up with some new ones. But trust me, you are gonna love these quirky people and learn a ton. Just go here and start downloading for free.
And after that? Audiobooks on audible.com
Listen to those and then we'll talk.
If you couldn't be there, here's a link to a photo or two of our team's view of the big event. Many thanks to Jen Summers and Lauren Broussal for a lot of hard work hosting the MMRHS part of the party. :)
I would have done an architectural rendering in watercolor of each skier but the water kept freezing!
Chapter 14: The ROKU Box (The first in a series of slightly ireverent posts in which we discover tools to help all of us watercolorists--whether you do architectural renderings or more traditional subjects--stay a little more sane during all those hours in the studio.)
OK, you're a dedicated watercolor artist, you've got your favorite triad, your favorite brushes and paper--all good. But now, you've reached the seventh consecutive hour of NPR today and you need a break. You have Netflix Instant, but you don't want to spill water on your laptop keyboard. Solution? The Roku box. It's the little black box about the size of an old video tape that you've heard about but haven't tried yet, and it's gonna change your world. Roku works with your Netflix Instant queue, but it plugs right into your TV and streams your Netflix Instant selections directly from your wireless bridge or modem to your TV (as another video input similar to a DVD player connection). You turn on your Roku box, select Netflix Instant, and scroll through your awesome selections until one hits the mood (I'm on my fourth consecutive 30 Rock Season 3 episode as we speak.)
http://www.roku.com/
OK, so not every time is right for Roku, but if you're on deadline and you can spare just enough mental bandwidth to pay partial attention to, oh, I don't know: R. Crumb? or Mystery Science Theater 3000? Or My Architect? Or Room With A View? Or any of the other pure awesomeness that is your Netflix Instant queue, then I heartily suggest you make the Roku box part of your palette. Next week: green tea.
A fascinating look at the wide variety of techniques that architectural illustrators are using across the world.
I'm helping my friends Maria Nation and Molly Boxer promote a great upcoming fundraising event at the Berkshire Botanical Garden.
Five top NYC & Berkshire-based designers are going to each design a garden shed, starting with the same standard prefab design and transforming it into something fantastic. At the end of the event the designs will be available for purchase. Its still early, so none of the designers has committed 100% to a design, but Maria and Molly thought it might be fun to get their members and newsletter readers thinking about sheds by asking "what kind of shed would you design if you could do (almost) anything?" I was recruited to provide a sketch of a design for their newsletter, but I convinced them (after several mimosas each) that it might be fun to expand the scope and help readers imagine what a typical designers' design process might be like. Since most designers I know start with "what's been done before," here's a link to about 40 great shed images available on the web, and a scribble of my own, below. I won't be (sniff) doing one this year (sniff, sniff) but I hope you enjoy anyway.
Kickin it old school at the Archive. Where are they now? I was thinking to myself, OK, what do these happy people from innocent times at Kent State School of Architecture have to do with an architectural rendering website, then I remembered...wait, these people ARE my CLIENTS!!?? Sort of. Enjoy. Huge thanks--I think--to Chas (Kikel) for keeping these images. KSUers, don't forget to share comments at bottom.
Chillin' 70's style
Don Dennis and Chuck...nuff said.
The timeless stylings of Dave Boyce aka...I can't say it.
In 2001 we went to Tuscany and Umbria. Our itinerary came out of a book called Small Hotels and Country Inns of Italy, and every one of the book's recommendations were great. I was looking at the pics the other day and thought it might be fun--twlve years later--to compare some sketches I did then to the nearest photo approximations of the same views I could find on the web. So here they are:
Hotel di San Leonino in chianti country, 10 miles north of Siena:
Next came San Gimiginiano:
I get a lot of calls from architects, developers, fund raisers and building owners looking for an alternative to 3D digital rendering. Not that 3D digital rendering is a bad thing. It isn't. Let's be honest. It's frikkin' gorgeous... and versatile...and powerful in ways that architectural rendering by hand can never be.
But 3D digital rendering done well requires a lot of design decisions and information--more than most architects have the time to produce during concept design. And some would say 3D digital rendering lacks the warmth and ambiguity of traditional architectural rendering. What you see is what you get--no more, no less, and God protect the architect from her literal client if the design should change, or not look exactly like the rendering in the end.
Don't get me wrong. I use digital technology to build accurate models set up views, and study the composition of views. (Heck, I'll even give you the model afterward.) It's just that, for some designs and in some situations...
My friend Jim Bouton is cool because he a) pitched for the Yankees (and my next coolest baseball-related friends Dave Bell and Jack Lauer only played for Madison High School varsity, although come to think of it they both played against Willie Wilson for two seasons when Willie played for Summit High School) b) he wrote two famous books about pro baseball--Ball Four and Foul Ball--and c) because he put my name in the second book, and there is nothing cooler than when someone puts your name in their second book...
The proposed future promenade of the renovated stadium. Come on, how cool would that have been?
I have the coolest friend named Maria. She has an amazing garden and amazing barns and amazing dogs and a cool truck and a pretty cool boyfriend, but mostly she's just a great person and a generous friend. She is always having someone over to cook for, and she makes the best food. If you get an invitation to Maria's, you should consider yourself lucky--you are definitely going to have a good time eating really good food and talking to smart and entertaining people. And you might get a little schnockered. This is her dog Dash. Actually it's Roberto's dog, but everyone assumes she told him what kind of dog to get so it would match her dogs better. And it does! It's amazing.
Anyway, I have to draw where to put her barn for her, so I'd better get going. But here's a sketch I did for her oven. It was eventually built, albeit in a different form, by Mark Mendel, who is an amazing mason and an amazing person whom I met at one of Maria's dinner parties, even though I already knew him. Mark knows a sh_tload about jazz, which is cool. And even though he probably winces when he hears people say it, who doesn't want to know how to build cool stone walls? Anyway, hope you enjoy it and stay tune here for lots more drawings of things for Maria. I like to do it and it makes me feel better about all the times I eat food at her house.
This is actually the wrong drawing because I can't find the one I did for her but hopefully she doesn't mind.
(Author James Akers is a registered architect and illustrator with over 25 years experience. He provides both in-house and studio-based sketching, rendering, and what one might call "design stenography" services to many of NYC's and Boston’s leading architects.)
COLOR THEORY
Color is simply…well…actually there have been a ton of thicker books written about color. For our purposes, color is what you are trying to copy from life onto an empty, terrifying little piece of expensive paper, with no guarantee that you’ll ever show the result to anyone, using only some "color juice" in a tube, a little brush and some water.
ONE WORD...COLOR WHEEL
Click to enlarge
OK, that's two words, but if I had used one word it would be this...
INTRODUCTION
1-This is the shortest, easiest to read, best book ever written on watercolor. The idea is to get you over the hump and painting within minutes. Why? Because you are a procrastinator and you know it (or you wouldn’t have bought this book…or let your friend give it to you) So start reading and I want to see that paint fly. Ready, go.
WHY SHOULD I WATERCOLOR?
Because it’s a really cool thing to do, and its fun, and you’ll feel really good about yourself. Plus it helps you...
Here is a little book I made for my kids that explains the basics of making your first watercolor, from what stuff you'll need to use, to what a "triad" is, to how to mix colors and build up transparent layers and make your first watercolor. It's a work in progress and very basic, but hope you enjoy and please let me know your comments.
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