Composing Your Perspectives
One of the questions I get asked most is how do I compose perspective shots. I have touched on this subject in past posts but have not organized these concepts into one place. The tips discussed below are by no means the law. There are often circumstances that limit...
Train Pavilion Aerial
There are still some areas of Portfolio Vol. 4 that are missing information. One image that I just finished creating is an aerial of the train pavilion project that better shows the relationship of the new architecture to the iconic town water tower. I have several...
Battle of P.O.D. Printers 2016
You can spend a ton of time perfecting your portfolio, but all of that means nothing if you choose a bad printer. That is why I have spent the last several weeks testing out many online print-on-demand services. I wrote a post on Print-on-demand printers several years...
Culture Center Intro Illustration
As I rework some of the spreads for my upcoming Portfolio Volume 4, I find myself needing to develop several new illustrations to fill in some missing information or to help better tell the story. However, due to time limitations and the amount of images I need to...
Portfolio Vol. 4 Cover Designs
I have been working on some of the different design elements of Portfolio Volume 4 and this week I am focusing on the cover design. I wrote a post a few years ago on the cover design for Portfolio Volume 3 seen here. Not much has changed with the way that I am...
Cliff Retreat: New Spreads
The Cliff retreat spreads are underway. With most of the imagery generated, I had enough content to start thinking about how the pages would be laid out and how the story would be told. As with a lot of my layouts, the styles range quite a bit from spread to...
Cliff Retreat: Finale Image
I wanted to have some fun with this image and create something that conveyed the scale of this project. Sort of a grand finale image. I have already generated a lot of close-up vignettes, but nothing really showing the project its totality. I chose a view that would...
Cliff Retreat Interiors
I was finally able to setup some interior scenes for the cliff retreat design. I decided to go black and white with these images to relate back to the black and white exterior images generated a few posts ago. However, the desaturated colors will also help play up the...
Cliff Retreat Section Spread
For the past few weeks, I have been producing section illustrations of my cliff retreat design. As is often the case, the final result took a complete detour from what I originally set out to produce. I began the spreads rendering out two large detail perspectives...
Cliff Retreat Moments: Part 2: Material ID and Masks
In part one, I discussed some quick study vignettes of the cliff retreat design. For part two, I want to go into more depth about how I used a Material ID render channel to speed up my material selections and generate these illustrations in a relatively short...
Cliff Retreat Moments: Part 1
The cliff retreat has been a fun project to design and I find myself constantly jumping back and forth between the macro and micro scales of the design. For the micro scale, the lack of detail in the model can make it difficult to visualize some...
Cliff Landscape Study
A big part of this design is how the landscape slips under and around the structure. As a way for me to understand the relationship between the landscape and architecture, I put together a few diagrams. The success of this image relies heavily on the textures. The...
The Big Picture: Beginners Guide
I have a lot of content on this site and when I redesigned it in 2014, I made an attempt to organize the info so that everything was easy to find. However, I understand that people just starting out may still find this site difficult to navigate and not know where to...
Cliff Retreat Massing
As I move into the next design, I am thinking about several different site locations. For the past several projects, I have been working with scenes that contained a lot of context architecture or that were set in urban environments. For this next project, I am...
Train Pavilion Spreads
As I near the end of this project, I have started to compile all of the imagery into portfolio spreads. This is the first pass at organizing the illustrations and diagrams to tell the story of the project. As I put this series of spreads together, I am still...