Skills Week:Architectural Concept Drawing and Model Making

As part of skills week, I had a session on how to create a concept drawing and also make a model with my tutor. This is very useful for me for my project as I will be creating two concept sketches and one 3D model. It is also a skill that I will have to learn as I will be using it throughout my study when I progress.

 

We started with creating a concept sketch, we were working from an image of a house showing 2 point perspective. I used a HB pencil on paper and drew a horizon line first, also marking the left and right side vanishing points on the line. Then I drew a perpendicular line closer to the left of my page and drew two lines from the top of my perpendicular line to my two vanishing points. I then drew two lines parallel to my perpendicular line which gave me the basic shape of the house.

After that, I drew the wall that extended past the building. Making sure my vertical lines go the vanishing point was where I made mistakes. I would find myself drawing parallel lines instead of it meeting at the vanishing point. Once I corrected myself, I quickly got used to drawing it the correct way. I cleaned up any lines that I didn't need again and drew the second story of the building.

Once the overall structure of the building was done, I began to add windows and a door. I also drew the pavements, this is because I had to make the building have an environment in order to visualise it better. I made sure the lines for my pavement came from the vanishing point as well. Finally, I used fine liners to make the structure of the building more visible.

This is the how my building turned out. Some of my lines are not as straight as they should be and some parts need cleaning up but with continued practice it will get better.

For the second part of the lesson we practiced how to make a 3D model. We worked from measurements given to us of the front, rear, west and east side elevations. The material used was mountboard and the equipment was a blade knife and a cutting mat. I measured the dimensions with my pencil on the mountboard first before cutting it out. I followed this step for all four sides of the model. Cutting out the parts were hard as mountboard is difficult to cut and some of my edges are rough because I mistakenly went over the line and my blade was not sharp enough

Lastly, I glued the parts together using PVA glue. For the roof I used extra mountboard I had as I did not have any greyboard

I think this session was very beneficial for me and being able to practice and perfect these skills before creating my final project is helpful. I will take into account my mistakes and try my best to avoid them when creating my final piece