This is the last workshop I’ve attended. I chose this workshop because I realized that hand drafting skills are very important after submitting the construction drafting project for ARCH1162 (before that, I always use CAD for my drawings). As I said in the last post, I wanted to do this workshop earlier but it was already full then.
The first week we started off with drawing a plan, elevation and section of a cup. It’s quite hard as our tutor has asked us draw the curves of the cup with free hands, where almost no one in our group has drawn a good round circle by the end of the day.
Here’s my cup. I decided to leave the section cut to be white, as we have to render the cup so pure white stands out better. Another reason is that when I tried to fill in the cut with black, the pencil marks I’ve erased became very significant.
Similar to the Fluid Thoughts workshop, this exercise has helped me develop my observation skills and my drawing skills. I first drew the cup with a very ugly circle, but after a few practice, I found out that I started to draw better curves, with less wobbling lines.
Another skill I’ve leant in this exercise is rendering skills. Rendering is a very important skill in drawing, because when you look in a drawing, a rendered image gives more depth than a non-rendered one. Therefore I think that the Fluid Thoughts workshop has really helped me to do better in the rendering of the drawings in this workshop.
There are two main outcomes that we have to produce. The first was the in class exercise, which includes the tea cup above, and three more that is going to explained below. The other was a presentation drawing of one of two houses, the Botta House and the Rose Sidler House. We were told to prepare some plans and sections for the final presentation drawings during the break. I chose the Botta House for my drawings because I already found the building interesting far from where I first saw other students drawing this building far from the first rotation.
On the second class, we started to draw perspective drawings. This exercise has helped me improved my, obviously, perspective drawing skills and rendering skills. I have attended some drawing class when I was in Hong Kong, therefore it is quite easy and fun to work on this exercise.
This is what I produced in class.
This is not a finished version, because there are still a lot of details that I haven’t put in the drawing.
Moreover, I’m interested in the landscape of Botta House as well as the bridge, therefore I tried to draw an angle that shows both the features. However, I found it difficult to do so as the angle we drew is quite low, where the landscape would actually block the view of the house. In the end I produced a drawing that cuts off the landscape a bit.
The final one was better rendered and more details such as trees were added onto the drawing. The scale was better considered as well when you see the person on the bridge was too big on the first drawing, where I scaled her a bit lower in the final one.
The third week was a relatively relaxing lesson as the exercise is quite easy and the main aim of that lesson was to discuss about the final presentation drawing on week 12.
We did two exercises this time: one is a mock up of the final drawings, and the other one was a shadowing exercise of a house.
The mock up came with two similar ideas, both axonometric, while one is a compacted and the other is in a vertical line. I think the structure of Botta House is very similar to a box, therefore I think it would be interesting if I folded the box out, showing the plans and the elevations outside. therefore I chose the vertical layout, which has an exploded drawing effect.
The shadowing exercise is very interesting, where you have to think logically, such as which part sticks out and cast a shadow? Is the long long enough and cast a shadow on the ground? The outcome of this exercise is quite satisfying as well, where it also helped me to think more on adding depth on a 2D drawing, creating a sense of three dimension out from two dimensions.
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Throughout the workshop, we have to prepare our drawings for the final presentation. The first thing I did was to scale the Botta House drawings back to a correct 1:100 one and use tracing paper to produce all plans, sections and elevations.
This is the version of the traced plans. At first all the unnecessary details such as furniture were also traced, without learning the space of the house. Then after seeing other students’ work and other photos, I got a sense of the space inside the House and erased parts that are not necessary. I also think that sticking the tracing paper onto a white sheet limits the way to manipulate the drawings. Therefore I scanned the drawings, rearranged the layout and then print then back out.
This is the drawing that are processed and were printed out.
After printing out the drawings, I started to find ways to make the drawings more interesting. Because I think the drawings are quite clear, with all the floors and elevations laid out in a informative way, I tried to let the drawings ‘speak for itself’. I tried not to add any descriptive works such was the floor number, etc. on the drawing, where I think its very obvious in my drawings as which floor is which.
The Botta House is a quite interesting house because you may see the House is in a box shape on the outside, there is actually a lot of void spaces and openings that breaks that ‘box’ internally. The idea of the exploded drawing also comes from here. I also extended the lines of the wall, to show the different openings which makes the box ‘not so like a box’, also to express the plans in a 3 dimensional way. Then the walls are rendered, quite exaggerated, on how the openings helps cast interesting shadows on the internal walls.
The 3D drawing is something more like a remake of the in class exercise, with more thought. I wanted to draw both landscape and the bridge as the focus, so I chose a higher angle, which makes the building has a three point perspective, and draw the building in a top to low view. The red bridge is the only colour it had on the exterior, therefore I included it in as well, which sharpens the main emphasis of my drawings.
This is the final drawing I produced. Like what I said earlier, this drawing is an exploded drawing of Botta House, where I use a quite literal way of expressing it, exploding it!
The 3D drawing is like what the building was before the explosion. Then the plans are placed above, one further to another, showing the motion of the explosion. On the top was the roof and the elevations and section along the corresponding sides.
The main benefit of this workshop was truly the rendering skills I obtained through the exercises. Nearly all my exercise has somewhat rendered and I think it is very useful to generate 3D views from 2D plans. Another skill that was pushed further was the thinking related to the process work. This could be said as the main theme of the whole course, where we need to communicate in a more creative way, where the three workshops overall has helped me achieve this.
Something that was very important for this project which was not taught from the workshop was time management. It is because it is already end of semester and almost every course has an assignment to due in. Therefore we have to be very careful on how much time we need to spend on each assignment, or else it would be a disaster when focusing only in one assignment.
