3rd Workshop- Drawing workshop

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.

2nd workshop- Fluid Thoughts to Action

 

Actually I wanted to take the  drawing workshop first then this as I think drafting skills are more crucial for me, however it was already full when I went to sign up. Therefore I have to choose this workshop first.

In the first week we went to Sydney Opera House to draw, obviously, the Opera House. The major idea is to discover abstraction and fluidity in the drawings. We produced two drawings on that day. The first was simply an abstract drawing from a still angle of the Opera House.

Then we moved on to draw one side of the Opera House, where the most interesting thing is that we have to move about 10 meters away from the original place we were drawing, and draw the view you see on the same sheet of paper. I first it is confusing to draw two different angles on the same sheet of paper, but after I started to draw more, a sense of transparency was developed when the drawings are overlapped, and movement can be seen.

 

The movement is clearly shown on the different shades of the curves on the top right corner, which is where the roof of Opera House moves away when I walk further out.

After lesson, we were told to form in groups of four and started our collaboration drawings. This first one is a drawing of an architectural space, which was from a description of one of my group members.

In the second class, we started to draw still life drawings. But there’s something different from normal still life drawing, where the tutors will come once a while and rearrange the objects on the table. This again helped us to develop our observation skills, as well as showing movement and transparency in the drawing. However, I find this drawing to be very difficult as only our group have to draw soft objects such as cloth and plastic wrap. It makes it hard to draw, and it even harder when the objects are rearranged, which makes the drawing confusing.

This is the close up view of the drawing. You can see the cloth in the middle is quite messy, as it went through a few rearrangements.

The other drawing produced on that day  was a drawing of the cityscape through the window of Red Center. I chose the sports ground outside Red Center, because when I looked at it, I saw people running and its in the late afternoon, where the shadows projected becomes very long and I think that is interesting. After that, we enlarged a part of the drawing into a large scale, which shows the transparency through the background. I chose the bench that’s on the pathway beside the sports ground. Be cause the bench is dark in colour, I had to add more shadows in the background to obtain transparency.

This is the second home collaboration project done. It was actually based on a continuous drawing we did from our group. We first take a corner of a drawing from one of the teammates, then use that part to create another A2 drawing and then send a corner of mine to another person.

So here’s my part of the drawing, in original:

After all of us has finished the drawing, we were asked, on the third class, to produce another drawing that combines all of our drawings into a single drawing(which is the image on top). Luckily all of our drawings have a common in them: we all have a lot of curves. This helped a lot when joining all our drawings together.

We decided to arrange our drawings along a curved line, which matches with the overall theme of our drawings. We also leave some white spaces on the drawing, which could help focused on the line as well.

This is the other collaboration project we’ve done. It is a drawing of a wall in the room. However, our group decided to draw a pillar that is in the center of the room, because we think that it would be interesting if we draw from different points of view on the same pillar, a 360 degree view could be seen. Therefore we started drawing the pillar from different angles, then ripped our drawings and pasted them together into a new one. It went out well as we could talk to each other and confirm the process of work, where in the first one we don’t know what the purpose of the drawing so we produced quite different drawings.

These two collaboration projects has helped my to gain more confidence in communicating in English, as it is not my first language. It also helped me(and my group members) to think in a more creative way, as it is not an easy task to find ways to join four different drawings into one, where the second one is easier than the first one as we have to aim on a theme of the drawing and we can communicate while we are drawing in class.

 

At last, we have to group all of our drawings into a folio, which is in a format of a concertina style. I immediately put the still life drawing in the middle, as it was the longest one and the one I like most so I want it to be the center of attention. The two Opera House drawings is put on top of the drawings as they are the two where I think has conceived most in the aim of this workshop, which is abstract and fluidity.

 

The last thing I want to talk about is a continuous work through the whole workshop, which is a A4 sketch of my home, twice a day. I think this is the greatest part of work in the whole workshop, as I was quite a lazy person, but I like drawing. I had another sketchbook which I told myself to draw a picture once a day, but in the end it only lasted for a couple of weeks. This project has surely pushed my to have a continuous work of drawing a space, which has helped me develop a better drawing skill. However, I found it sometimes difficult to draw the same place in a different shade in only black and white, which usually gives out similar drawings in the first few days, but it gets better when I got used to drawing the space.

Here are some drawings that I like better:

 

 

After this workshop, I think I gained more knowledge into observing buildings and objects in a more different way. I can now see the difference of a building while moving along and away from it.

However, I didn’t really get the grasp of drawing in an abstract way, because I am more used to drawing objects precise, with the shadowing and outline correct. I sure did learnt about drawing in a motion way, but it was only the outcome not satisfying.

Moreover, I think the workshop has helped me with the third workshop(Drawing workshop) as well, because the shadows and depth of rendering is also needed in that workshop as well, and I think it makes it easier to work through the workshop.

1st workshop-Material Modelling

As we do not have any model making projects on semester one, I think that this material modelling workshop would be suitable for me as it helps developing skills on model making, which also could help with other model related projects for further years.

The first week we started with some basic modeling skills and techniques, such as making simple cubes and pyramids. I think it is very useful, as we have to make a site model for our design studio that was due on the week after; therefore the skills learnt from the workshop could instantly be used on making the site model, especially on how to make the model precise, such as ways to cut the boxboard (balsa wood) and considering the thickness of the boxboard as well.
We also did a 1:1 model of an object that is besides us, in a group of 2. My teammate and I did a replication of a UHU glue. This exercise was fun, where it helped me to develop communicating and observation skills, as we have to measure the glue and spilt up what parts we have to do.

Then on the next week we started on making a model of a place that I was used to. Our aim was to alter the place creatively so that it forms another architectural space.

Here are some photos for my space before alternation:

The place I chose to make is my room, where I spent most of my time at home in. I didn’t like this place much because it is quite a small place when all the furniture was moved in, but it could not be seen through the model. Therefore I added the furniture as well in the model(but I forgot to take photos after the furniture were put inside).

Another thing that I didn’t like about was that there is a weird diagonal space in the corner of the room. It is a small space where nothing could put in to fill the space, therefore I started to put my used garbage in that space. I didn’t like that at all.

Moreover, my apartment is located in Pyrmont, which is not far from Darling Harbour. However, the space was blocked by surrounding buildings and the view was not good as well.

Therefore I wanted to change all these weak points and make a room that I feel comfortable living with.
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What I first did is to eliminate the weird diagonal space. Actually I made use of that diagonal and made a cut along the line to the wall opposite. Then I tilted it and made it perpendicular to the wall adjacent. Therefore a bigger space was created. I also extended the walls so that the space was made bigger as well. Moreover, for the view, I simply added another level on top so that I could get a better view of Darling Habour.

This is the outcome of the space.

The main theme of the alternation is spiltting and tilting.







































Other furnitures are also put into the model (which are the same as what I have in my room now) to show how the space has increased, so it didnt feel so crowded as before.

I also included this as the background of the model, which helps to show that the view of the room has become better. （I cropped the image as it is too long to fit in my model.

Another thing we had to make for the assignment was a photo collage of the model. The theme of my collage was the process of change of my room. The left (covered with red spikes) was the room I am now living in, and the right was the ideal room I wanted to live in. For the left hand side, I drew the plan of my room out, where oversized furniture were cut and randomly pasted onto the plan, so you can feel how crowd and uncomfortable the space is. The red spikes has put emphasis on how disturbed I am when I am living in this uncomfortable space.

Then it shows in the middle on how I wanted to alter the space, like what I said above. The main concept in the collage is that i cut up the original photo of my room(actully, the model of it) and arranged it into the shape of the room I liked. Then on the right is the altered version of my room, where you can see how I put emphasis on the computer desk, which is the place I usually were at(because my room is too small and I have nowhere to go!) The colour turns to a blue colour and the lines became smooth organic lines, which shows the calmness and how I am satisfied with this place.

After attending the material modeling workshop, I think it really useful; as it taught me with the basics of model making, which helped me a lot when making models for the deign studio. It also helped my with the thinking skills that helped me think a lot more for the design studio as well. Overall,I think the material modeling workshop is a quite fun and useful workshop to start with, and I am quite satisfied with the learning outcome of it.