Hybrid Drawing Techniques

Design Process and Presentation

Gilbert Gorski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317622628
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Design

Hybrid Drawing Techniques: Design Process and Presentation reaffirms the value of traditional hand drawing in the design process by demonstrating how to integrate it with digital techniques; enhancing and streamlining the investigative process while at the same time yielding superior presentation images. This book is a foundations guide to both approaches: sketching, hardline drawing, perspective drawing, digital applications, and Adobe Photoshop; providing step–by–step demonstrations and examples from a variety of professional and student work for using and combining traditional and digital tools. Also included are sections addressing strategies for using color, composition and light to further enhance one's drawings. An eResource offers copyright free images for download that includes: tonal patterns, watercolor fields, people, trees, and skies.

1

Getting Started

When ideas are detached from the media used to transmit them, they are cut off from the historical forces that shape them.

(E. L. Eisenstein)¹

Why Use Hybrid Techniques?

While many designers now work exclusively in a digital environment, some use both traditional and digital techniques simultaneously, and a few remain committed to only using traditional techniques.

The latter group misses an essential truth: if work is to be significant, the media used to transmit and project ideas cannot be excluded from the production of those ideas. Today, nearly all ideas are conveyed digitally; non-digitized forms of communication are becoming marginalized. To create with only traditional tools fails to recognize the important relationship between media and message.

The first group also misses an essential truth: if work is to be significant, the media used to transmit and project ideas cannot be excluded from the production of those ideas. Humans are also part of the media; interactions we have with each other as well as our environment give our lives meaning. To create with only digital tools fails to recognize the important relationship between media and meaning.

Since the Renaissance, documenting architecture on paper elevated the act of creating architecture from the physical to the cerebral. Treatises on architecture took their place on library shelves as collections of human thought. Traditional drawing has held a privileged place as the tool best reflecting the designer’s thinking process.² Original drawings are like original paintings, “in which one follows the traces of the painter’s immediate gestures. This has the effect of closing the distance in time between the painting of the picture and one’s own act of looking at it.”³ Physical models are another important tool, but they don’t provide the same connection back to the thoughts of the designer, as they are almost always created by assistants. By contrast, digital models are often created by the designers themselves, giving them a direct, efficient, and powerful investigative tool. However, the use of digital tools has diminished the use of traditional drawing, leaving the digital artifact as the only evidence of the designer’s thought process. Whether it is an image on a screen or a computer-generated print, these artifacts do not connect us as intimately with the artist’s creative process as do hand-made drawings.

With any art – poetry, dance, music – personal expression is facilitated through mediums – words, human bodies, instruments – that are capable of subtlety or exaggeration. For the last five centuries, architects have investigated manipulations of light and shadow, mass and proportion, texture and rhythm, principally through traditional drawing, a medium that facilitates nuanced expression. For all their advantages, computers do not easily allow for expressions of subtlety or exaggeration. While traditional drawings or paintings created by different individuals always look a little different, computer-generated 2D and 3D images almost always look the same. If a process uses visualization tools that yield similar images, will not the same process tend toward yielding similar solutions?

The creative process works best when it involves random variables. Some have found ways of using digital tools to introduce chance and risk back into the process. Primarily relying on innovations with software code that yield unpredictable results, these designers engage the process as editors, responding to whatever accidents or surprises the computer generates. This approach, however, distanced from a process more directly controlled by human intellect, can become detached from social memory and often yields forms that have a limited potential for practical application other than isolated pieces of sculpture.

In a way never possible with traditional techniques, digital tools facilitate investigations into the possibilities of visual phenomena: transparency and reflection, texture and color, light and shadow, and movement – both of the sun and the viewer. These investigations, however, require advanced skills and it is unfortunate that few designers pursue acquiring them. The majority seem to fall into two groups: those using sophisticated software for exploring the novelty of new forms, and those who settle for software with less robust modeling capabilities, either because they possess Building Information Modeling capabilities, or because the software is easy to learn, inexpensive, or free. Either way, in responding to ever-present pressures for improved efficiency, both groups accept the computer’s proclivity to gravitate toward predetermined solutions by: over-relying on existing 3D files; over-using certain tools that yield quick results while forgoing design possibilities that are more difficult to manage; and increasingly relying on various forms of artificial intelligence built into the software to simplify or remove human skill and decision-making from the process.

Contemporary media’s embrace of digital imagery accelerates society’s trend toward replacing reality with recorded images. Convenience drives the explosion of devices that facilitate this phenomenon. Compensating for limitations imposed by shrinking interfaces, digital media favors highly graphic subjects: strong geometry, dramatic contrast, or vivid color; this at the expense of portraying more nuanced subjects that require physical encounters to be appreciated.

1.1
Hybrid drawing technique: a process of first conceptualizing with hand-made drawings, and then using digital tools to confirm, refine, and document.

Both traditional and digital tools have a place in the design process. Appreciating the strengths and limitations of each tool is the key to understanding how to integrate them and why this is important.

Traditional Drawing Limitations	Computer Advantages
1 Favors concepts that are documented through orthographic drawings: plans, sections, and elevations. 2 Abstracts the process of creating 3D objects in a 2D environment. 3 Challenging to create complicated 2D and 3D geometry: intricate or repetitive patterns and subtle textures. 4 Traditional techniques can be cumbersome to merge into a digital environment. 5 Yields images corresponding to a single viewpoint. 6 Focuses creativity in one individual. 7 Individual means of expression invites subjective evaluation. 8 Requires many years of practice. 9 Integrated analytical capabilities are limited. 10 Changes can be difficult. 11 Does not easily facilitate fabrication of building components and systems. 12 Involves risk; variables concerning tools and individual skills can yield unpredictable results.	1 Documents and quantifies organic or irregular objects; is not encumbered by 2D representation. 2 Facilitates creating 3D objects in a quasi-3D environment. 3 Anything imaginable can be realistically simulated in a digital environment. 4 The digital environment is the standard. 5 Capable of simulating movement with animation. 6 Capable of linking and simultaneously combining many contributors’ efforts. 7 Standardized means of expression allows for objective evaluation. 8 Facility with computer software can be mastered in less time. 9 Can be used to analyze material and environmental performance. 10 Changes are easier. 11 Can be utilized to facilitate fabrication of building components and systems. 12 Removes risk; standardized tools yield predictable results.
Traditional Drawing Advantages	Computer Limitations
1 Sketching forms better visual memories by slowing the process of assimilation and inviting the other senses to reinforce experiences. 2 Matches right-brain manual skills with right-brain thinking tasks.^4 3 Practiced hand–eye coordination develops muscle memory; knowing how to draw is never forgotten. 4 Process is grounded by human biology. 5 Hand drawing is spontaneous; it is hard-wired to the brain. 6 Emphasizes individual expression; no two people draw exactly alike; if the process of drawing yields images that are personally unique, it is more likely the designs they describe will also be more unique; work that is unique is memorable. 7 Allows for serendipity, abstraction, and fuzzy thinking. 8 Allows for discovery through improvisation; the hand completes what the mind begins. 9 Observing the entire drawing at once confirms the relationship of the parts to the whole. 10 By progressing from small sketches to larger drawings, a process of considering overall concepts first and small details later is encouraged. 11 The pressures traditional drawing places upon the design process, a convention used since the Renaissance, are well understood. 12 Layered drawings, erased lines, tentative lines, or hard lines – like analog time – engage the designer with the past, present, and future of the process. 13 Specialized drawing skills give the designer control of the design process.^6 14 Conventions of communication have evolved over 35,000 years and have become assimilated into our culture. 15 Involves risk; variables concerning tools and individual skills can yield unpredictable results.	1 Instantly acquired digital images compromise memorization; cameras and humans see things differently. 2 Mismatches left-brain manual skills, such as sequencing keyboard commands, with right-brain thinking tasks. 3 Keyboard commands; recalling locations and sequences are forgotten without constant practice. 4 Process is grounded by software designers. 5 Interface between mind and machine lacks nuance.^5 6 Suppresses individual expression; all CAD drawings look alike; if the process of creating in a digital environment yields images that are similar, it is likely the designs they describe will also be similar; work that is similar is unmemorable. 7 Images always look finished. 8 Most discoveries are made through software innovations or accidents, the computer generates what the mind can’t anticipate. 9 Rapidly zooming in and out compromises a sense of scale and the relationship of the parts to the whole. 10 Overall concepts and small details are simultaneously considered. 11 Responding to what looks best on a monitor, managing polygon counts and computer processing speed, and relying on the quick but limited results afforded by inexpensive software imposes both subtle and significant pressures upon the creative process. 12 Like digital time, computer-aided drawings indicate only the present, and leave no trace of the process. 13 As computer applications become easier to master, digital drawing skills become common and diminish the designer’s authority; clients become their own architects. 14 Conventions of communication are new, evolving, and not completely understood. 15 Removes risk; standardized tools yield predictable results.

Digital Tools

The following equipment is required to create in the digital environment:

• computer, keyboard, and mouse

• back-up external hard drive(s)

• scanner

• monitor

• printer

• stylus tablet.

It is beyond the scope of this book to cover these items in depth; rather, my purpose is to provide enough information for a beginner to inform their choice when using a...