BLOG
What type of learner are you? [Infographic]
People learn in a variety of ways. Identifying and understanding your learning style can help you maximize your educational experiences by finding ways to make learning more efficient. The 4 main categories are visual, auditory, read/write and kinaesthetic. Which one are you? Read this infographic to find out!
10 best iPad art apps for painting and sketching
From established tools like Zen Brush to new upstarts like Sketchbook Ink, these powerful painting and drawing apps can help you start creating iPad art today!
When the iPad first launched it was pegged squarely as a media consumption device. To create professional art and design, you'd still need a fully-fledged laptop or desktop system running a full-fat operating system like Mac OS or Windows. Right?
Wrong. The iPad art apps in this list prove that Apple's tablet has moved beyond just being for media consumption and is fast becoming ripe for content creation. If you're an illustrator, artist or graphic designer, you can now work effectively on the move - sketching, painting, prototyping, and annotating photos. Invest in a good quality stylus and try one of these amazing iPad apps on for size...
http://www.creativebloq.com/digital-art/art-on-the-ipad-1232669
3D World: CG tutorials and tips for animation, VFX and games artists
Now 3D World is more interactive than ever! Watch video tutorials immediately with the tap of a button; enjoy professional and student animation and VFX videos; and get all our tutorial files downloaded to your workstation! Plus: image slideshows, text-free artwork and more!
Alex Roman’s Architectural Visualization and Animation Book
I am so looking forward to this book. Alex Roman has revealed that he will shortly be releasing a book about his influential architectural visualization animation The Third and the Seventh. Though he has yet to release any specifics about content he says the book will contain "beautiful hires imagery artwork, philosophy and processes behind the short film". See the official site www.thirdseventh.com for more updates
Why Light Needs Darkness
http://www.ted.com Lighting architect Rogier van der Heide offers a beautiful new way to look at the world -- by paying attention to light (and to darkness). Examples from classic buildings illustrate a deeply thought-out vision of the play of light around us.
Architectural Drawings No Less Protectable Than Art
By ADAM KLASFELD
MANHATTAN (CN) - Architectural renderings enjoy the same copyright protection as Edward Hopper or Claude Monet's paintings of houses, the 2nd Circuit ruled, reviving a case that could hold major realtors accountable for infringement. Scholz Design says it produced drawings of three luxurious, tree-shaded houses, "Springvalley A," "Wethersfield B," and "Breckinridge A," which it registered in the Copyright Office in 1988 and 1989.
Although they were not detailed enough to serve as construction blueprints, the Connecticut-based company Sard Custom Homes used these renderings as a guide to build the homes, according to the court's summary.
Scholz says that Sard agreed it had no right to copy the images or use them for advertisements.
In October 2010, Scholz filed a lawsuit claiming that Sard broke this contract by sharing the pictures with Prudential Connecticut and Caldwell Banker, which put the images on their websites in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
U.S. District Judge Janet Arterton dismissed the case, finding that an architectural drawing must be able to serve as a blueprint for construction to be protectable.
A three-judge panel at 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected that proposed rule on Wednesday.
"We see no reason why Scholz's drawings depicting the appearance of houses it had designed should be treated differently from any other pictorial work for copyright purposes," Judge Robert Sack wrote for the panel. "Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper were famous for their paintings of houses, and Claude Monet for paintings of the Houses of Parliament and of Rouen Cathedral. None of these depictions of buildings were sufficiently detailed to guide construction of the buildings depicted, but that would surely not justify denying them copyright protection. If an exact copy was made by the defendant, as alleged, and as appears to be the case based on the evidence submitted with the complaint, that would appear to constitute infringement."
The panel chided the federal judge for stepping into the realms of art criticism, quoting Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes as saying, "[i]t would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law to constitute themselves the final judges of the worth of pictorial illustrations."
According to the decision, the realtors also contend that they have the right to use the drawings under fair use, which allows for the publication of copyrighted images for news reporting, criticism, scholarship and research. The appellate court would not consider the issue at this time because the district judge did not factor that defense in her decision. The case will return to District of Connecticut, and the realtors will have to pay Scholz for the costs of appeal.
Paper is Flat
The essence of paper is flat, a dimensional plane. When possible, put your light source in a spot that helps accentuate the big plane changes of your model. This often means placing the light a little off to the side of the model. Angle the light source so either the light or the shadow shapes dominate your design. A 3-to-1 ratio is usually a safe bet.
Atmospheric Perspective
Atmospheric perspective. Often referred to as aerial perspective, atmospheric perspective references the compounded effect that air and light have on objects as they recede. As the reflective light off the object filters its way through the intervening air to the viewer’s eyes (referred to as the line of sight), the contrast between the object and its surroundings diminish, detail decreases, color saturation (chroma) weakens and shifts towards the skylight color, which is generally blue unless it is sunrise or sunset.
Knowing When To Stop
Knowing when to stop is an issue many artist struggle with, particularly those employing a photo-real style. I've created some terrific architectural renderings by not stopping at the "pretty rendering" stage, but instead pushing on to that magical moment when the piece turns into a "capital -B Beautiful rendering. Yearning for something more has become my greatest struggle in creating art.
Know Your Potential Client
Prior to contacting a potential client, do the research. Search the internet to piece together a historic perspective of the company.
Start With Good Photographic References
An architect friend of mine once told me that your rendering will only be as strong as your reference. With enough experience, you may be able to make a successful rendering, no matter how compelling the reference is. However, until you’re making consistently strong, engaging renders, take this idea as gospel: start with good photographic references.
Point and Click (render)
Pulling a camera view and hitting render is much like picking up a point-and-shoot camera and clicking away. Many renderings I'm seeing have exceedingly little that is artistically pleasing. The renderings provide raw information that does not take into account the concept of aesthetics. An artist, working digitally, can manipulate the viewer's eye by leading it through the composition to a specific focal point. The lightest part in an architectural scene is the part that is perpendicular to the light source, and the closer the parts are to the light source, the brighter they will be. You can take some artistic liberties and pitch planes toward and away from light to create drama.
The Race Against the Machine
In Race Against the Machine (which is a terrific read, BTW), Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson make the point that the impact of Moore’s Law is just beginning to hit its radical phase. Andy and Erik use the analogy of the fable of the invention of chess as a way to talk about what happens once the power of exponential improvement really takes hold of processes and people and technology. The way the fable goes is as follows. Supposedly the inventor of the game of chess showed his creation to the Emperor. The Emperor was so delighted by the game that he allows the inventor to name his own reward. The inventor was a clever man, and so he asks for a quantity of rice to be determined as follows: one grain of rice is placed on the first square of the chessboard, two grains on the second, four on the third and so on with each square receiving twice as many grains as the previous one. The Emperor agrees, thinking that this reward is far too small for such a fabulous game.
He is reassured in his thinking during the early phases of the rice doubling because it really doesn't seem that impressive initially. Even after 32 squares, the Emperor has given the inventor only about 4 billion grains of rice. Now that’s an awful lot of rice, but it is only about one large field’s worth. However, it is in the second half of the chessboard that volume of rice becomes overwhelming. In the second half of the chessboard the Emperor ultimately realizes that the number of grains of rice is equal to 2 to the 64th power – 1, or about enough rice to make a mountain the size of Mount Everest.
The point that Andy and Erik make with this fable in terms of technology is that we are now starting to move into the second half of Gordon Moore’s chessboard. It is in the second half of the chessboard that technology change accelerates. And if the changes and improvements in hardware technology (as represented by semiconductor capacity) are not impressive enough, our ability to create software and algorithms improves even more quickly than our ability to improve the hardware.
What's Your Message?
Like every painting, every rendering, should have a message. The message may not be earth shattering, and your viewer may read something different, but, nerveless, a message should always be there. Having something to say is the most valuable thing and illustrator can have!
Search out the Composition
Sometimes ideas for composition just come to you, fully formed. Other times you have to build them from scratch. In both cases, you still need to play with the idea to develop it. Once you start to render, there many other things to work out that you may not notice serious compositional flaws. Once you have committed a lot of effort to developing a view, you may be reluctant to make changes.
If ten people set up to render the same thing you'll get ten different renders People see from different points of view, both literally and figuratively. Everyone has cliched ways of looking at things. Breaking those habits and taking a fresh viewpoint is vital to the artistic process. You know the experience of seeing something familiar as if for the first time; it seems alive and exciting. That's the way you want to try to see things before you render.
Rhythm in your Rendering
If any interval, or rhythm, in your rendering, becomes too repetitious or systematic, it feels lifeless and unnatural. This remains a typical problem that afflicts beginners, but it happens to me all the time. In art, the principle of line rhythm is essential in creating a hierarchy of information that feels comfortable and natural for your viewer to interpret. Without variety, your rendering can become wallpaper fading into the background of our attention. Like an endless row of fence post, we cease to notice or pay attention.
Too much variation is incredibly disruptive, Each decision you make when putting information into your model has visual implications. Not enough unity and you have confusion. Too much unity and you are bored.
Learning a New Skill
Most learning we do is conceptual learning, which is quite different from developing a skill. Conceptual learning is a process of developing an understanding of a subject and can often be done through listening or reading. This is primarily intellectual. In developing a skill, there is also understanding, but this understanding must be coupled with the practice of what you are learning. Sometimes you must practice without an intellectual understanding because that comes only when you can do it. Learning conceptual subjects can sometimes be done extremely rapidly. But learning a skill, is rarely something that can be acquired immediately. You must master each aspect of the skill before going on to the next. In learning new skills, practice a little bit every day. If you try to learn it all at once, you may wind up understanding how it is done but not be able to do it exceedingly well.
Sunshine Adds Pizzazz
Sunshine adds pizzazz to your rendering and makes life seem more charismatic. The human eye sees in three dimensions and can compensate for poor lighting. A rendering is only two-dimensional; therefore, to make an impression of form, depth, and texture to the subject, you should ideally have the light come from the side or at least at an angle.
The Snow Is Not White
We, as architectural illustrators, have to see the world with an artist's eye. Often, I get questions, about how I create such realistic renderings. My reply is simply, use a lot of real world references and try to recreate it virtually. Our brain often plays tricks with our eyes. We tend to see what we want to see and not what reality is. Try this. Grab a photo of a snowy day (just an example) and using an image editor like Photoshop sample the color of the snow. You'll find that the snow isn't actually white at all, but our brian knows snow to be white, so it is overriding what we actually see.
Most of the time, when we look at the world, we aren’t actually looking at all. Instead, we are relying on the knowledge about the world we have stored up over years. We know the table is flat, so we don’t actually bother to observe how that flat rectangle on four sticks looks out there in the world from the particular position in which we are currently standing.
Our brains operate as efficiently as possible to filter the wealth of information coming through our senses. In fact, we don’t truly see with our eyes at all – we see with our brains. Only those things which are unusual, a potential threat, or have changed significantly, cause the brain to react – our attention is caught and for once we are genuinely looking at what is out there.
When we were children we looked at the world like this most of the time – everything was new to us – exciting and waiting for us to discover it. As we got older, less things were new. We’d already seen so many trees we stopped looking at bark patterns, the same happened with the clouds in the sky and on it went – as our body of knowledge grew ever larger we paid less and less attention to those things we had seen before’.
Fortunately it is possible to recapture that the ability to pay attention to the world again – and to look at things directly rather than filtered through a cloud of knowledge. Some knowledge is of course required for rendering, but make sure it’s the right knowledge. The laws of perspective, what something looks like from every angle – this is the kind of knowledge you need and will develop as you learn how to render.
One of the most crucial part of a photo-real architectural rendering is textures. In my snow example If, you make your snow white it will not be natural; it'll look off and your viewer will sense something is wrong. Try adding either a fresnel reflection or tinting your snow material blue, which is actually what is happening in real life.