Residential Design

Well I have completed my first set of client presentation boards for a residential remodel project. The above are the five final board layouts that were presented. I feel extremely proud of what I accomplished because I think my quality of work really shows through in these boards. I can't even begin to describe how long these took to put together, they seemed never-ending! Not only did I have to create all of the drawings and perspectives from scratch, but attaching everything like the materials to the boards was an extra step that took equally as long.

This project dealt with three clients living in a house in Arizona, the grandmother, Anna, who is confined to a wheelchair, the mother, Cynthia, who is a teacher, and the daughter, Gracie, who is seven years old. The remodel of their home thus had to consider the accessibility requirements of having a wheelchair, both in terms of bathroom space for Anna as well as kitchen accessibility since she does most of the cooking. Other requests from the clients were for an exterior shower (for use after they spent time in their backyard pool), and an East-facing breakfast area. They also needed storage and workspace for Cynthia's quilting and grading of papers.

My concept for this design had to do with Layering of spaces from public to private. I really focused on making this layering read through in my plan and also through my concept board (the second one down). I had some difficulty with how to showcase my concept through the bubble diagram and design parti, but in the end I think it presents well and is quite clear to understand. One thing is for sure, I will never again underestimate the amount of time it takes to make quality presentation boards!

I had some difficulty actually presenting my ideas verbally, and I will chalk that up to being exhausted and somewhat mentally out of it after two nearly sleepless nights of work. Still, I wish I could have more concisely explained more of the aspects of my design which because I didn't explicitly mention them, I think were overlooked. I am not used to going in and explaining all of my design choices, because with Architecture presentations I was more concerned with expressing the overall idea of the design, mentioning a few high points, and then letting the reviewers go at it. I have a feeling with Interior Design, it makes more sense to really go into the design room-by-room and ensure the reviewers see all the thought I put into each part.

As far as my individual drawings go, I am very happy with the way my three rendered perspectives turned out. The living room perspective is probably my favorite because I think it uses color successfully and shows the way the space can be utilized by the clients.

The perspective of Gracie's room is a bit off, as the reviewers noted, because I think I drew Gracie too short/small. I had looked up the average height of a seven-year-old but must have gotten the height wrong, because I agree, she looks tiny compared to the trundle bed.

The last perspective I drew was the exterior view of the house. I feel like this perspective accurately shows the space, but I wish I had given it a bit more color in terms of the plants hanging down from the pergola or other plants just around the space. Still, I think it does what it is meant to do; show the garden space that is accessible by Anna. Additionally, I think my marker rendering skills have progressed since my last attempt.

While the reviewers seemed to like my perspectives (perhaps with the exception of Gracie's room because of her miniature size), what they really seemed to respond positively to were my elevations. I tried to give them plenty of depth by varying the line weights and it read very well from a distance.

Conversely, I think that my furniture floorplan and demolition floor plan came out a bit light and difficult to read from afar. This is probably because I did those drawings first and didn't take the time to look at them in comparison to the later drawings I did that had more contrast and darker, more readable lines. At least I have learned a considerable amount from this project and hopefully in the future won't make the same mistakes again! Overall, I am very happy with how this one turned out!

Speedy Rendering

Rendering under a time limit is pretty stressful, that's for sure. I had drawn this living room scene beforehand and masked certain parts with tape, but was then given two hours to render the entire drawing (actual size is about 18"x24"). Now, I have obviously become a bit more familiar with my markers at this point, and making slightly different shades of the same hue isn't quite as big of an obstacle. I really like the overall look of my rendering, but the one part I wish I could change is the wall color. The walls were one of the first surfaces in the drawing that I tackled, figuring that those would take the longest. I felt rushed, so I sort of just picked a color at random and threw it on the walls. Almost as soon as my Light Peach marker touched the paper, I realized that the pink color was a tad too bright for my liking. I then had to spend time applying various gray shades to try and tone it down, and used a darker peach color to show plane change. Again, this darker peach is too vibrant in my opinion. After I finished rendering in marker, I had a little time left to add some colored pencil detailing for depth and a bit of texture. This really helped bring certain parts of my rendering together as I was able to pull some of the greens into the furniture and shadows (Color Repeat). I wish I had had more time to really repeat colors throughout the drawing though, it could still use some depth in places. Still, for a first attempt at rendering an entire room full of furniture, I think I did pretty well!



Rendering Techniques

This set of drawings uses different rendering techniques on the same chair. I am very happy with the way these chairs turned out, especially the Cross-Hatching, Line Value, Border Composition, and High Contrast. This chair is not very linear and so the plane changes are subtle if seen at all. This made it challenging to show depth and the actual form of the chair, but I think I managed to work with each technique to highlight the chair as best as I could. The true test with these is to step back a bit and view the chairs from a distance; if you can see the form of the chair clearly from far away, then I think the technique was successful.

Still Rendering

This rendering is a good reference point for me to come back to since it labels all the different rendering techniques as discussed in the Lin book. It is still missing the overall usage of Good Graphics that I mentioned before, but it at least shows one example of each. Colored pencils were more familiar for me to work with, but I realized that it was pretty easy to get carried away with color and end up with a rainbow effect, especially when trying to use Color Repeat throughout the drawing. I do think the drawing looks balanced, and it works well to illustrate the various techniques. However, there are some things I struggled with such as the overall color. It seems to me to be a bit technicolor or overdone. The colors aren't as realistic as I would have liked them, and this might have to do with the colors I chose from my pencil set. Overall, as I said, this is a good point of departure for the rest of my renderings and a great place to come back to for reference in the future.

First Renderings

These renderings were some of my first attempts at using my Prismacolor markers. I found that many of the colors were much more vibrant than I assumed they would be, probably because I have only used markers on regular drawing paper in the past (which absorbs more of the ink and the pigment doesn't seem so bright) instead of the marker paper they are intended for. With these drawings I was focusing on drawing freehand lines, but I did not make very good use of the Good Graphics I learned about from the Lin book. I have since progressed to using it much more frequently in my renderings. Markers do not act the same way colored pencils do, as I quickly found out. Blending the colors and trying to make different shades of the same hue can be very difficult, especially when you don't have the right neutrals to work with. In the future, I would do well to buy some more muted tones for my marker collection so that I have more to work with than just the basic 48 that came with my set. Still, I think my work was fairly well done for a first attempt with the medium.