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Discover Yourself As an Artist
As you start creating digital art, try not to be too hard on yourself. You learn more from your mistakes than you learn from your successes. At the same time, don't go overlooking improvements you see in your techniques. With a lot of screen time and a lot of patience you'll, be illustrating like a pro in no time. Guard your identity! it's tempting to copy an artist you admire. However, if you genuinely desire to succeed as an artist, you want to allow your own artistic spirit to come through your work.
As long as you're consistently developing as an artist, your work will continue changing, and your style will continue to grow.
Having said that, artists have been creating art for a long time. Use your favorite search engine, or go to the library, and explore all different types of art. By studying works of art, you can discover different techniques, and styles, that you can use to develop your own skills.
Nobody Remembers Normal
Last month my son Benjamin, who is turning eight this month, had a hard day at school. After some bribing with the potential of longer computer privileges, Benjamin shared with me his troubles. Ben, who has Asperger's, told me kids at school were saying he was not normal. I told Ben, "nobody remembers normal". With the point of entry into computer graphics lowering I am seeing a lot of computer architectural illustrations being posted online. The majority of these illustrations are extremely limited and do not take into consideration the fundamentals of art. I compare this trend to the point-and-click camera. Most of us have a camera on are cell phone. Everybody can point and click to snap a photo. But not everybody takes a treasured photo.
Most computer architectural illustrations I'm seeing have a blue sky, puffy white clouds, and lack personality. These illustrations bore me and I find little excitement looking at them. Technically they might be accurate but creatively they lack substance.
Typically, in an architectural illustration, you'll see a clear blue sky, puffy white clouds, and apple green grass. Architecture's original purpose was to take us out of the elements. Try some dramatic lighting, perhaps the calm before the storm, or the calm after the storms. Concentrate your efforts on giving people a reason to go inside and get out of the storm with some bright sunny interior illustrations.
My point is straightforward. Anybody can pick up a camera or their cell phone and take a photo. Not many people know what makes a picture or rendering meritorious, they just know that it is. If all you create is blue skies with white puffy clouds and green grass your architectural illustrations will be normal, and nobody remembers normal.
Looking back at our lives, we all remember people and places, that were not expected. Referring back to my son Benjamin, his favorite Wonder Years episode, was the one with Margaret Farquhar. We all remember the Margaret Farquhars in our lives, because they were not normal.
Architectural illustrators play a supporting and essential role
Architectural illustrators play a supporting and essential role in the process of rendering designs for structures and buildings of all kinds. This skill set allows for architectural firms to maintain healthy relationships between the client and the contractor. This is essential in the long, and sometimes difficult and expensive, process required to carry a design from dream to reality. A accomplished architectural illustrator should also be aware of the wide range of techniques available to the professional.
The way in which clients hire architectural illustrators may depend on the specific type of structure involved. Industrial and commercial clients, for instance, may deal with illustrators only through large architectural firms. People proactively involved in designing a residential building for themselves, on the other hand, may directly engage illustratrors to craft designs for them. Moreover, regardless of whether the building involved is a house, factory or storefront, people can choose between specialized illustrators or illustrator and architect partnerships.
Illustrators can allow clients to conceive of how different details will be used in a structure. For example, illustrations might render the landscape surrounding the house, industrial workplace or commercial facility. Design drafts could also lay out the details of a building's floor plan and interior. Architectural illustrators effectively create models uniting all of these different elements, most effectively with 3D software. Builders can also take advantage of illustrators by employing them to create images of homes to show to potential buyers. In short, people involved in the home or workplace construction process should never overlook the benefits potentially offered by architectural illustratos.
Detail
Detail is a imperative to any well-finished rendering. If overdone, however, detail can be a detraction. Too "busy" a rendering is bewildering, and its main purpose is smothered in a welter of minutia.
A talented artist recognizes this fundamental fact: what is left out of a rendering can be as significant as what is put-in.
Study of photography with a wide range of tonal value will help you understand how and where detail should be played down or limited. Notice its tendency to disappear in bright sunlight or dark shadow, how obvious it becomes in middle value areas, how much vegetation is massed together rather than seperation in isolated clumps. You will also learn much by examining the work of other illustrators
Cropping
An illustrator has a natural tendency to include too much in a composition. When this fact is clear, he has an equally natural reluctance to remove portions of a rendering over which has worked so diligently. Renderings are often improved significantly by some judicious "cropping" - removing areas that detract from the center of interest or interferes with the effectiveness of the composition.
None of the rendering actually needs be cut away or destroy. It may be crop differently (non-destructively) for another use, so keep the entire rendering and crop in a non-destructive way.
Get Paid, Not Played!
Good news: Senators Robach and McDonald have both signed on as co-sponsors of the Freelancer Payment Protection Act.
This crucial win puts us in a much stronger position to get it passed because both senators sit on the Labor Committee – the group that needs to review our bill. Even better, Senator Robach is the committee’s chairman.
And it’s a direct result of your work: many of you attended meetings with your senators to lobby them, and provided your own personal stories of nonpayment so we could share them with legislators.
That’s what it takes: all of us coming together to make our voices heard. And it’s working.
Please visit Senator Robach's Facebook page and email Senator McDonald to thank them and let them know we’re grateful for and counting on their ongoing support of freelancers.
Best,
Sara Horowitz
Founder and Executive Director
P.S. We’re not letting up now: we’re sending a new member’s story every week about how deadbeat clients affect their livelihood. If you have a story you’d like to tell, please sign in to share it in The Freelance Life.
Capture and Delineate Ideas
The primary pupose of design studies is to cature and delinete ideas. Attractive drawing is desirable, to be sure, but it is secondary in importance to the visualization of the tenitive, nebulous concepts that are the initial steps to any architectural project. By necessity, you must work very closely with architects, designer, and other planners to translate their thoughts into a tree-dimensional forms. Through all stages of an architectural project, your work is a valuable means of communication among the personnel and also between the architect and his client.
Whats its color
Whats its color is an image-color processing utility that will evaluate an image and give you the image's primary and complementary dominant colors of an image, how many visually unique colors are in an image, and the top ten visually unique colors in an image. Extremely useful when creating any type of designs around an image. The more colorful the image, the better the results. Results will display your image on the best suited background for that image... http://whatsitscolor.com/
Bridges of Hope
I was asked to create some art, for the non-profit orginization Bridges of Hope, to be used for a fundraiser. Here is how it turned out!
New York Sun Deck
Here is a project, currently on the board, of a high-rise sun deck. The deck is currently not being utilized, and the building is under new management, so the developer commissioned me to illustration the sun deck's potential.
Shadow
To create the most pleasing shade and shadow pattern, light intesity should be greatest on the main facade (or facade at the least angle to the picture plane). Secondary or receding walls receive less intensity and are lightly shaded.
Cast shadows should be deep enough to strengthen and emphasize the eve line, but not so deep as to overpower the architectural design with a too-heavy effect.
Deadlines
Ideally an assignment is given enough time in advance to allow ample time for proper thought and execution. Like it or not, the tyranny of the deadline is one of the harshest facts of an illustrator's life. The sooner you learn to live with it the better. It is also an excellent teacher; having to meet a deadline is a sure way to developed skills and temperament demanded for quick competent drawings.
Employ Your Services
Average laymen, including many actively enaged in construction and development, find it extremely difficult to visualize the project from bulky plans, elevations, details, diagram, and other specifications included in a set of working drawings. Your knack for translating them into attractive three-dimensional form will be a major reason for others to employ your services
Introduction to Modeling in 3ds Max 2012
I have just completed the digital-tutors video series call, "Introduction in 3ds Max 2012" 5 hrs. 11 min. | 10/03/2011 | 3ds Max 2012 | Author: Joshua Kinney
In this collection of lessons we will learn about the different modeling techniques available in 3ds Max 2012 to create a future concept bike. In this series of lessons we'll be discussing some the introductory methods for modeling in 3ds Max 2012 and you should begin to develop techniques that will complement your own style of modeling. Through out these lessons, we will learn a variety of different modeling methods, such as spline modeling that will allow you to easily model irregular objects with ease. Then we'll learn how to use primitive geometry to build some of the more complex objects of our concept bike. We'll also be introduced to several of the common tools used for modeling in 3ds Max. Finally, we'll learn how to create some basic materials for our bike to create some really stunning 3d renders. By the end of this course, you should have a solid grasp of the different modeling techniques and begin coming up with a modeling style that works best for you
Design Studies
Major commercial and residential complexes, highway and airport projects, resort areas, transit systems, and municipal improvements developed with aid the of 3D renderings affect the living and working habits of an entire city or state. As an artist, we must use our head as well as our hand in our concept and visualization. We must be able to work closely with others, grasp ideas quickly, and proceed much of the time by our own judgement.
101 Things I Learned in Architecture School
I have picked up, and put on my to-read list, "101 Things I learned in Architecture School", by Matthew Frederick.
This is a book that students of architecture will want to keep in the studio and in their backpacks. It is also a book they may want to keep out of view of their professors, for it expresses in clear and simple language things that tend to be murky and abstruse in the classroom. These 101 concise lessons in design, drawing, the creative process, and presentation—from the basics of "How to Draw a Line" to the complexities of color theory—provide a much-needed primer in architectural literacy, making concrete what too often is left nebulous or open-ended in the architecture curriculum
Knowledge....
Knowledge of construction and better than average design ability are frequently required for architectural rendering art. As often as not, the artist finds himself working more with ideas and sketchy reference material than with the detailed plans provided for other forms of architectural illustrations. He must be prepared to invest and improvise when necessary wthout straining the credibility of the subject.
Sophistication and Competition
Today success in the field is difficult for any proffessional who does not develop his skills quickly enough to keep abreast of trends. Sharpen Your Pencil
The success of an illustration depends on how well it tells a particular story or suits a purpose, rather than on how it was produced.