Wednesday, November 2, 2011

And then I discovered straight lines



So far I have done only "reality" drawings on my iPad. That is, portraying only things I am actually looking at, whether landscape or buildings or interiors. But my attempts at depicting buildings continued to look messy and imprecise because I did not have a "ruler" to draw straight lines. But lo and behold, in the controls for Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, I found a tool to draw not only ruler-straight lines, but frames and blocks and circles and ovals as well. So now when I draw a window, I don't have to draw the frame free-hand unless I want to. I want to draw things that look like what digital master artist Robh Ruppel draws. His architectural scenes are amazing, and at least some of them are drawn on an iPad.

The window you see here is in the music room of my parents' house, over the piano. This used to be a really nice room until it became jammed with my father's hoarded clutter. No one can do anything about it now. You can see overgrown foliage and some fall leaves out the window. The fall colors in New England this year were surprisingly dull, due to heavy rains in August and September.

Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, October 2011.

2 comments:

Tristan Alexander said...

And why are you impressed by the "work" of someone who can use an automated program to draw/paint half or more of his work? To me if it is not freehand WHY shoudl anyone be inpressed with it and why should it be considered art at all?

Pyracantha said...

Tristan: If you're an industrial or architectural artist, you use a ruler, T-square, and triangle. Digital art uses the same tools, but they are virtual. I'm trained as an architectural artist and I believe that a cityscape or rendering of buildings can be art no matter what tools are used. Straight lines do not have to be "mechanical."