Hello YouTube, this’s Frank from Architectural Aesthetics.
And today in this video we’ll be taking a break from the digital marker drawing series
because the royal Ontario museum drawing I’ve been working on isn’t finished yet.
Instead, I’ll be voicing over an old drawing of mine, and comment on the tools and techniques
I deployed during the making of it.
Before we begin, I’d like to point out that this prairie style residence I was rendering,
is designed by Yunakov architects, and is located in Ukraine, I’ll put the link of
its coverage in the description box.
The drawing is done using autodesk’s sketchbook, formally named sketchbook pro.
It is my favourite drawing software, I’ve made numerous videos about it.
However, today we’ll mainly be talking about how to do digital architectural marker drawing
with it.
More specifically, what tools and techniques we can use, to get the hand drawn marker aesthetics
that is dripping with marker wetness that can almost quench your thirst.
As you can see the perspective framework of the building is drawn in the desktop version
of Sketchbook with my wacom tablet intuos pro.
And please indulge me to gripe a little bit about the discrepancy between the desktop
and the iOS version of Sketchbook.
I think both of them are excellent softwares, however, the desktop version have some ‘exclusive’
tools that are not available on the iOS platform.
And these include the robust perspective tool, which allows you to construct rigorous perspective
views with ease, the french curve tools, and the steady stroke tool.
Complaints aside, the perspective tool is extremely intuitive and pleasant to work with.
For this drawing, I paid a lot of attention to the lineweight variation, aiming to let
my audience to be able to easily differentiate bold contour lines and fine detail lines.
In terms of the drawing tools, the hard pencil tool does a great job at drawing jet-black
bold lines, especially when you’re working with large sized images that are at least
300 dpi, while the ball point pen tool gives you unwavering, uniformly weighed lines that
really mimic technical pens.
It’s worth mentioning that, since the photo reference I was using isn’t true 1 point
perspective, oftentimes I had to use personal judgment to determine the position of the
lines.
Here for the textures of the dry stack stone columns, what I did was I used generalized
line patterns to render roughly 1/3 of the column, and just copy and paste the region
I’d just drawn to cover the whole thing.
This technique is not quite different from what we do with texture rendering in 3d modeling
softwares, in the sense that we’re stacking seamless texture maps to cover the whole material
surface.
I really want to emphasize the importance of the quality of the ink drawing, because
it is the defining factor that either breaks or makes an aesthetic digital drawing.
Hence to accentuate the organic contour line of the dry stacked columns, I spent a lot
of time making it conform to the patterns of the stacked stones.
And after I’d rendered the stone textures and marked the positions of the greeneries,
I moved on to the colouring stage using the iOS version of sketchbook.
Here I really want to praise sketchbook’s ‘vintage marker tool,’ it’s safe to
say that till this day digital drawing softwares are still very limited when it comes to mimicking
hand drawn qualities.
The end result of the synthetic brushes, watercolour brushes look nothing like their real life
counterparts.
However, I really do think autodesk sketchbook nailed their marker tool right on the head,
as the wetness, stroke overlapping of the marker tool is just as good, if not better
than the effects real world physical markers.
As for the color palette, I went with the built in Copic color library.
It’s extremely versatile, and allows you to render any common place materials.
Moreover, the semi transparent nature of the Copic colours adds more authenticity to your
marker drawing.
And in addition to that, sketchbook allows you to change the hue and saturation of your
layers on the fly, which is something that traditional marker drawing can never achieve.
For larger areas, I used the ‘glazing’ tool, to achieve a flat, watercolour washed
look.
We all know that watercolor is a beloved medium for architectural rendering because when it
comes to conveying volumes and lighting conditions, no other medium comes close to watercolour
because of its transparency.
And on that note, I would say autodesk sketchbook’s glazing tool is the closest thing you can
get to mimic watercolour washes.
You can see the effects for yourself, the sloped roofs in this drawing are all done
with the glazing tool.
For the organic greeneries, I used the felt pen tool to delineate the foliage, and left
them filled with white, to contrast them against the fully coloured architecture.
As for the window reflections, it brings up another advantage of digital drawing, which
is its tolerance towards mixed medias.
In physical drawing it would be hard or impossible to apply gouache to a marker drawing, because
of the build quality of the paper for marker drawings can easily get crumbled under gouache.
However, since we’re working with digital canvas here, we can really do whatever we
want.
Hence the reflections of the nearby trees in the glass windows, which would be very
hard to render with markers, were easily indicated with synthetic brushes.
As for the lawn, I experimented with different rendering techniques, and finally decided
to render it with bold, generalized marker strokes.
Same technique for the background trees, since they’re in the background and only included
in the composition to indicate the scale of the house, my intention was to generalize
their forms as much as possible.
This is indicated in the simple strokes used to delineate the leaves.
Lastly, I deployed vertical marker strokes to indicate the background sky.
The rectangular blue sky is an aesthetic choice, because I wanted to leave some of the background
as blank so that there’s a sense of contrast.
However, after considering feedbacks from colleagues, I realized the blue rectangle
does a terrible job at conveying spatial depth.
If I were to redo the sky again, I would use a graded watercolour wash, instead of marker
strokes.
Alright guys, that wraps up today’s video, I hope you found it informative.
Please let me know your thoughts down in the comment section, and stay tuned for next week’s
video on the royal ontario museum.
Bye bye.