APRES TRAVEL

The trips that we take are often way too short. I always find that however long we travel, the time could have at least been doubled.

One great way to extend your trip is to draw from your photos after you get back. Now that we are back from our trip to Spain, I am doing just that each day. I call it Apres Travel Drawing.  And I find it amazing how the feelings, sights and sounds come back to me when I am drawing from the photos that I took.

As has been outlined previously, you have to take more than one photo of a building that interests you if you want to transparently draw it later. I saw this building in the first small village that we had lunch in right after I got off the plane. I was immediately intrigued with the way the gable roof tapers and steps given the irregular and curving plan shape. Of equal interest is the sloping topography around the building.

So I took these photos. And from these photos I made my drawing this morning. Although you always could have taken one more photo, I was able to draw a volume with reasonable fidelity to the original. While I wish that I would have walked all the way around the building, we were running off to see another site, and I simply did not take the time.

What did I guess at to make my drawing? The floor, shown in red. With the large door opening, there must be a floor that works something like this. I also guessed at the back elevation; indeed the back might be of far more interest than I drew. Nevertheless, the back has to work something like I drew, given the plan and roof geometries.

While my drawing above is not the world’s greatest, I do feel that it has helped me to internalize what I was attracted to originally. And that attraction was the organic yet gabled enclosure. It really is a fantastic geometric assembly. And frankly this basic parti could be used for any number of building types.