by Alex Hogrefe | Oct 24, 2011 | Portfolio Vol. 2, Uncategorized |
One thing I miss more than anything after finishing school was building physical models. As much as I enjoy rendering and illustrating, my favorite part of the design process was getting away from the screen and building study/presentation models. My thesis...
by Alex Hogrefe | Oct 16, 2011 | Fundamentals |
With this tutorial, I wanted to show the workflow that I use to develop a clean looking architectural site plan. This tutorial, like many of my tutorials, doesn’t use a rendering engine, only Sketchup image exports and Photoshop. Although I don’t...
by Alex Hogrefe | Oct 11, 2011 | Uncategorized |
I made a trip to New York this weekend hence no new tutorials. However, I thought I would fill the space with some photos I took while there. A few of the shots are HDR images. That last one is of the New...
by Alex Hogrefe | Sep 27, 2011 | Styles / Effects |
Ahhh, Finally decided to throw together a HDR tutorial. Its not as in-depth as some of my other tutes, but describes the overall process I use. I created a rendering just for this tutorial, one that I thought would work well for HDR processing with lots of...
by Alex Hogrefe | Sep 12, 2011 | Break Down |
I’ve been putting together some program diagrams for work, and it reminded me of one that I created a year and a half ago in grad school. Experimenting with different arrangements and adjacencies of programmatic needs in Sketchup proved to be an effective...
by Alex Hogrefe | Sep 5, 2011 | Final Moves |
I received a lot of feedback and emails from people after posting the “Honduras Illustration part 2” asking for a tutorial on adding light rays. I put together this video explaining how this was done. You will will realize that there’s not...
by Alex Hogrefe | Aug 27, 2011 | Final Moves |
As I get more into photography, I find more and more things that overlap into architecture illustrations. One thing that I never thought about in school when creating illustrations was the idea of avoiding converging vertical lines. Obviously, this isn’t...
by Alex Hogrefe | Aug 21, 2011 | Break Down |
I realized that I never posted these images that I created a while back when I posted the Honduras Church illustrations. In this case, the design is relatively simple composed of 5 elements added to the untouched shell of a house in Honduras. The space is...
by Alex Hogrefe | Aug 14, 2011 | Break Down, Over Time |
As the title implies, this architecture illustration tutorial doesn’t use a rendering engine. I have done a few other tutorials in the past that don’t involve a rendering program, however this tutorial does things a little differently, and in less...
by Alex Hogrefe | Aug 11, 2011 | Uncategorized |
It has been way too long since I last made a post. I wrote something on this blog’s Facebook page (join it if you havn’t already HERE), but forgot to post something on the actual blog. I have been off preparing for a wedding, getting married, and...
by Alex Hogrefe | Jul 4, 2011 | Styles / Effects, Uncategorized |
Yesterday, while watching golf, I saw a commercial that folded paper out of a book into buildings that turned into a town which then grew into a city, etc. The commercial caught my attention not only because of its execution and concept, but also because the...
by Alex Hogrefe | Jun 28, 2011 | Uncategorized |
I’m increasingly becoming more interested into architectural photography. However, I’m less interested in the clean, flawless photos, and more about learning new, unique techniques and abstracting the images, similar to my approach with...
by Alex Hogrefe | Jun 13, 2011 | Break Down |
I’ve been designing my wedding invitations this weekend and figured I could kill two birds with one stone and try to get a post out of it as well. After all, I have been attacking these things like an architectural design project so it seemed to make...
by Alex Hogrefe | May 17, 2011 | Styles / Effects |
If you haven’t discovered them already, there are a few websites that have been around for a while that let you apply unique “filters” to images. Both are equally easy to use, and provide many parameters to adjust the final outcome. I’ll...
by Alex Hogrefe | May 8, 2011 | Final Moves |
As with many of the other tips in this series, this tutorial adds a last minute “kick” to an architectural illustration. What is nice about this process is that the contrast is increased, but at the same time, the sharpness is decreased providing an...
by Alex Hogrefe | May 7, 2011 | Final Moves |
Vignetting is something you see a lot in photography, and it works just as well in architecture illustrations. The idea is simple, the edges of the illustration are darkened to “frame” the image and draw attention to the center. If there is a lot going on in...
by Alex Hogrefe | May 7, 2011 | Final Moves |
This tutorial looks at some grunge and sketch overlays to add a little artistic styling to an architecture image and break away from the “fresh from the rendering engine” look that too many architecture presentations have. Sometimes, illustrations need a little...
by Alex Hogrefe | May 7, 2011 | Final Moves |
Layer blend modes in Photoshop are something that I use for every rendering I do. I often will add a color overlay to change the mood of the illustration and provide cohesiveness to the different elements of the illustration. This process is quick and the...
by Alex Hogrefe | May 7, 2011 | Final Moves |
Adjusting the levels is similar to adjusting the contrast, but gives you more control. More importantly, it adds depth to an image and punches up the color just a bit. The process takes seconds, and is something I do at the beginning and end of post processing....
by Alex Hogrefe | Apr 22, 2011 | Break Down |
I have just finished a few architectural renderings this past week for a really exciting villa design located in China. I started out the illustration as a daytime scene, but decided to take advantage of all the glass and go with a dusk scene. I put a ton of...
