PERCEPTUAL THINKING
Let’s try teaching our scientists to think like artists. One of the themes of these pages is the confluence of art and science. We have talked about scientists using the same language as artists....
Tagged: DRAW LIKE A BYZANTINE
FIGURE GROUND, A TRANSPARENT DEFINITION
Webster’s defines figure ground as follows: a property of perception in which there is a tendency to see parts of a visual field as solid, well-defined objects standing out against a less distinct background....
YOUR CLIENT’S BRAIN
We have been considering what is happening when your client hates your design. We have discussed both emotional and logical responses of our clients. So it was with great interest to learn about a...
ANTI-TECHNIQUE
I am wary of watercolor technique. You might call me anti-technique. Open any introduction to watercolor book and the pages are bold and bright and frankly intimidating. Those books demonstrate all sorts of standard...
CINEMATIC LECORBUSIER
I believe that LeCorbusier was very dependent upon pictures and photographs to make his architecture. His books are stuffed full of photographs of ships and machines. I pretty sure that when he was designing...
TRANSPARENT CONTOUR DRAWING
Certainly one of the most powerful tools with which to see is the contour drawing. I guess that is why authors such as Nicolaides in his The Natural Way To Draw essentially starts his...
EARLY PERSPECTIVE THINKERS
During the 1620s, Francis Bacon, a Franciscan monk, composed the Opus Majus. This was intended to be a compendium of the knowledge of the world. As we may expect from a Franciscan monk, he...
ARCHITECT BLOGS OF NOTE
There are two architect blogs that pertain to sketching, watercolors and architecture that are fun to check out. Frank Harmon, who is an architect, has a nice blog titled Native Places. This link was...
VISUAL SERENDIPITY
A word that I keep coming back to is associative. If our drawings promote and foster associations in our minds, then they have added value. And we have mentioned Google Images as a medium...
DRAWING IS DEAD
I respectfully note the passing of Michael Graves, Architect, who died yesterday at the age of 80. The Postmodern Movement, which Graves championed, was gaining its’ full strength while I was in architecture school....
TRANSPARENT THUMBNAILS
I like social media better than I used to. Because of the interesting discussion that has sprung up on a small corner of LinkedIn, as I mentioned earlier, I am starting to see a...
MATHEMATICAL DESIGN
Mathematics provides an interesting reflection on some of our favorite themes; knowledge, learning, abstraction, etc. Mathematics’ principal function is to problem solve. We use math if we need to know the area of a...
APPROXIMATIONS
Ideas require mental images. If you don’t have the former, you don’t have the latter. But what are these ideas in our mind? How exact are they? How real are they? They are best...
VISUAL SUPERIORITY
Have you ever thought about how lucky you are to be able to utilize and operate within the world of visual shapes, rather than rely instead on verbal language? The immense richness of our...
PLAY THE FANTASY GAME
The building is built. The design was done the best that you could have done. Yet I find it interesting to pursue the what if scenarios. What if, for example, there would not have...
FULL CIRCLE TRANSPARENCY
Thomas French, one of our far flung correspondents, sent an interesting and related note. This regards the PBS series Time Scanners. So that engineers may understand in greater depth the structural integrity of the...
TONE AND LINE
Transparent Drawing requires that you draw lines and then put tones between the lines. At least that is what I do. We should give some of our attention to the matter of tones and...
FORM GENERATION
As designers, one of the basic points is to derive a form that is unique to your problem and somewhat different that what has come before. The derivation of a new form is in...
INDIGENOUS PERFECTION
I happened to take a drive a couple of evenings ago. The late afternoon was warm and it was good to be driving rural roads. After 25 years of living up here, it is...
BUCKY FULLER
Buckminster Fuller is a supreme systems thinker. He argued from day one that to understand the part, you have to understand the whole. Early in his education, he rebelled against the manner in which...
MILITARY AXONOMETRIC
The use of parallel line drawing first came into wide use for the design of military fortresses. In light of the general invasionary tendencies in the 15th and 16th centuries, impregnability was foremost on...
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