A little late night perspective and two favourite architectural books

November 18, 2013 | Leave your thoughts

Missing the time to do some sketching these days – I need to make time and tonight I did that!

I decided that if I was going to teach how to use a little basic perspective when sketching buildings I should do a little myself as warmup.

Sketching from an architectural magazine:
In some ways I find this harder than sketching on location as I don’t engage with the building as well and I have to deal with distortion from camera lenses. Sketching from magazines and books is an important part of the design inspiration sketchbook that all architects are supposed to keep – something I have had many start stop attempts at doing regularly.

But getting back to perspective – I have my own simplified approach which I will share with my class… and it is best to do perspective setups slowly and carefully.(ie. if one believes in doing setups and I know some people have a hard and fast rule against that)  But I am not in that mood tonight so I went very quickly.  I do want to do some more without any setup at all but I thought some of you might like to see my red line setups as it explains the process a little better.

These drawings were done in a few minutes each. I am using what I call my ‘design sketching” style – very rapid fast confident line – confident in its start and stop but it is not always in the exact ‘correct’ position and so I reinstate when I need to. These are totally exploratory sketches. I am exploring the design of the building as I draw it.

I am really looking forward to sharing my thoughts on perspective with my classes this week…I am really hoping for a dry Thursday and Friday morning. I have found the perfect building with great lighting… but there are some other good things to draw if it does rain.

I have also been sharing a few of my favourite books today on instagram.

 

Best introductory book on Classical Architecture – very very readable. Highly recommended!

A book of lovely architectural thoughts and beautiful ink sketches.

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