Drawing - Using Harmony

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These are a few drawings I did while playing around with the Harmony program from the last post. It takes a little while to get used to how the program works. It isn't quite like drawing with pen and paper. Although I was using my mouse and trackpad. I imagine it would be quite different using a tablet or on the ipad/iphone. With those, you would have a bit more direct connection (or at least more familiar) with the drawing. As a result I found it quite difficult to subjects that were more rectilinear (as you can probably see in the house sketch). You almost have to let the drawing flow on it's own. So the organic shapes tended to work a bit better. It does bring up an interesting question of subject and medium. You really will get a completely different result by alternating the two. I think that is the next project.

Found - Online Sketching

An interesting piece of programming. Harmony, a project by designer and developer Ricardo Cabello, is a web based sketching program. Similar to the freehand tool in other programs, Harmony allows you to draw using your mouse or trackpad. A quick demonstration video embedded below. Harmony has been used to create an App for iphones and ipads allowing for mobile electronic sketching. If people are talking paperless work places, this is definately somethign to look into.



Try it out, click the link below:

Online Sketching

Found - The Campaign for Drawing

The Campaign for Drawing was launched in 2000 by the Guild of St George, a small charity founded by John Ruskin, whose writings on art, architecture, natural history, social and economic issues helped to shape Victorian cultural life. In 1871, he set up the Guild to assist the liberal education of artisans. The Guild initiated the Campaign to celebrate Ruskin's centenary and to promote his belief that drawing is a key to understanding and knowledge. Now an independent charity, the Campaign raises the profile of drawing as a tool for thought, creativity, social and cultural engagement. It has developed two programmes to encourage the use of drawing by professionals and others: The Big Draw and Power Drawing

The Campaign has created a new regard for the value of drawing to help people see, think, invent and take action. Its long-term ambition is to change the way drawing is perceived by educationalists and the public. This has won support from leading practitioners in the creative industries and in art, architecture and design colleges, signaling an overdue realisation that drawing is fundamental to the training of students in these disciplines. The Campaign takes a wider view. It sees drawing as a basic human skill useful in all walks of life. The Campaign's work will finish when the words 'I can't draw' are dropped from our vocabulary.

Link to their website below:

The Campaign for Drawing

Found - The Archigram Archival Project

The Archigram Archival Project makes the work of the seminal architectural group Archigram available free online for public viewing and academic study. The project was run by EXP, an architectural research group at the University of Westminster. It was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and made possible by the members of Archigram and their heirs, who retain copyright of all images.

Link to the project below:

The Archigram Archival Project

The 100 - 15-19

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In order: Frank Lloyd Wright, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Le Corbusier, Donato Bramante and VIllard de Honnencourt.

The 100 - 10-14

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In order: Julius Schorr von Carolsfeld, Mauro Gandolfi, John Flaxman, Frederick Sandys and Paulo Pagani

Found - National Gallery to reveal its fakes in exhibition

The National Gallery is dusting off some of its most embarrassing acquisitions for a new exhibition looking at fake artworks.

Close Examination will display works of art that have been quietly removed from view after research showed they were not what they were thought to be.

They include works supposedly by Sandro Botticelli and Hans Holbein which were mistakenly thought to be genuine.

More than 40 works of art will go on display at the gallery in June.

The exhibition is billed as a celebration of "the remarkable collaboration of scientists, conservators and art historians" at the central London gallery.

Full story below

National Gallery to reveal its fakes in exhibition

The 100 - 5-9

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As a continuation of the "100" project here are Michael Graves, Rob Krier, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Erich Mendelsohn and Paul Klee.

Classification of Drawings

In readings and trying to explain drawings to others I have run into the situation where I need to differentiate the types or categories of drawings. It has been difficult but I think Michael Graves has done it quite well in his essay The Necessity for Drawing.

There are of course several types of architectural drawing. By clarifying the dominant nature of each type according to the intention of the architect assumes for his drawing, we find three primary categories: 1 the referential sketch, 2 the preparatory study, and 3 the definitive drawing. This sort of classification can never be pure, as all drawings have aspects of each category. However, it is important to identify the primary themes each.

1 The Referential Sketch. This kind of drawing may be thought of as the architect's diary or record of discovery. It is a shorthand reference that is generally fragmentary in nature, and yet has the power to develop into a more fully elaborated composition when remembered and combined with other themes. Like the physical artifact collected or admired as a model holding some symbolic importance the referential sketch is a metaphorical base that may be used, transformed, or otherwise engaged in a later composition.

I presume that most of us are by nature lazy, and when we see something that interests us in the natural or built landscape, we may deceive ourselves into thinking that we can remember it without drawing. However, if we do draw to remember, the chance that the particular image or set of images will stay with us is obviously increased. In making such a record of our observation, we of course do so with a point of view. It is that very bias by which the natural phenomenon is interpreted, reseen, that allows the artist to identify with the image and causes it to have special meaning for him. It goes without saying that what the artist or architect chooses to draw, using his sketchbook as a record of observation, reveals the examination of his artistic conscience.

2 The Preparatory Study. This type of drawing documents the process of inquiry, examining questions raised by a given intention in a manner that provides the basis for later, more definitive work. These drawings are by nature deliberately experimental. They produce variations on themes and are clearly exercises toward more concrete architectural ends. As the are generally developed in series, a process that is not wholly linear but that involves the reexamination of given questions. Generally didactic in nature, these studies instruct as much by what is left out as by what is drawn. The manner in which they are able to test ideas and provide the foundation for subsequent development involves a method of leaving questions open through the presumption of incompleteness and the technique of pentimento - the erasure and subsequent reconstruction of thematic and figural representations.

3 The Definitive Drawing. This is the drawing that becomes final and quantifiable in terms of its proportion, dimension detail - indeed in its complete compositional configuration. In the two preceding categories of drawing, the burden of experience was placed on the life of the drawing as much as on the architectural conception. In the this final classification of drawing, however, the burden in inquiry in now shifted from the drawing to the architecture itself. The drawing becomes an instrument to answer questions rather than pose them. This is not to say that these drawings attempt to imitate reality; however, they can be regarded as the final step taken in the drawing process that allows the built reality. As in the preceding classifications these drawings must also remain somewhat fragmentary, since no single drawing can explain the several aspects of a building's intentions. The various means of representation of architectural ideas (plans, sections, three-dimensional drawings) show the building as an artifact imagined not so much through the existence of any one of these fragments, but by the understanding of the tension between them.