Color Drawing: Design Drawing Skills and Techniques for Architects, Landscape Architects, and Interior Designers

680 Pages·2006·40.58 MB·English

by  Michael E. Doyle

Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction

I - COLOR DRAWING FOR COMMUNICATION

CHAPTER 1 - INITIAL CONSIDERATIONS

BEFORE COLOR SKILLS, ACQUIRE DRAWING BASICS
PHENOMENA OF COLOR AND LIGHT
THE DIMENSIONS OF COLOR

CHAPTER 2 - MEDIA AND PAPER

MEDIA
PAPER

CHAPTER 3 - TECHNIQUE

WAYS TO APPLY AND ADJUST COLOR
IMPRESSIONS OF MATERIALS
CREATING THE EFFECTS OF LIGHT

CHAPTER 4 - ELEMENTS, MATERIALS, AND FINISHES

INTERIORMATERIALS
EXTERIOR MATERIALS

CHAPTER 5 - SCALE ELEMENTS: FIGURES AND AUTOMOBILES

DRAWING FIGURES IN COLOR
AUTOMOBILES

II - COLOR DRAWING FOR PRESENTATION

CHAPTER 6 - COLOR AND COMPOSITION IN ILLUSTRATION

HOW COLORS RELATE TO ONE ANOTHER: THE CONTRAST OF
COLORS
COLOR CONTRAST AND IMAGE COMPOSITION

CHAPTER 7 - APPROACHES TO CREATING COLOR DESIGN DRAWINGS

THE FIRST CONSIDERATION: MAKE THE LINE DRAWING
THE SECOND CONSIDERATION: CREATE A VALUE STRATEGY
THE THIRD CONSIDERATION: THE SCAN
THE FOURTH CONSIDERATION: APPROACHES TO COLOR
MEDIA
ADDITIONAL LAYERS OF INFORMATION

CHAPTER 8 - DIGITAL COLOR DRAWING

APPROACH
BASIC DRAWING TYPES
USING FILTERS IN DIGITAL COLOR DRAWING

GLOSSARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
DESIGN CREDITS
INDEX

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Copyright © 2007 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada

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ISBN-13: 978-0-4 71-74190-9 ISBN-10: 0-471-74190-6

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
TO WILLIAM KIRBY LOCKARD. FAIA
For your kindness, mentorship, and support.
Drawing as a Means to Architecture spoke to me as a student,
late one night years ago, and changed my life.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been accomplished without the presence of the
many generous people in my life:
My wife, Ellen, for her love and wisdom.
The partners of CommArts—Janet Martin, Richard Foy, and Henry Beer—
whom I thank for their continued and enthusiastic support.
The many designers and staff at CommArts, who freely gave their assistance:
Melissa Britz, Taku Shimizu, Bryan Gough, Kristian Kluver, Jim Babinchak,
Grady Huff, Patty Van Hook, and Gary Kushner. Keith Harley deserves special
thanks for the graphic design of this book and its cover.
John Bacus, for his brilliance and wit—and for opening my eyes to the digital
universe.
The Design Communication Association (DCA), for its support of both
traditional and new design communication education. The DCA has given us a
wonderful way to exchange ideas about how to more effectively communicate
our design ideas.
James R. DeTuerk, professor emeritus, Department of Landscape
Architecture, the Pennsylvania State University. I will be forever grateful for his
inspiration.
Frank M. Costantino, Douglas E. Jamieson, Ronald J. Love, Thomas W.
Schaller, AlA, and Curtis J. Woodhouse for their generosity in allowing me to
publish their professional illustrations. Their words of encouragement were
much appreciated.
Paul Stevenson Oles, FAIA, for his gentle insistence, through his work and his
words, that value is the key to effective color illustration.
INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this book is to provide an approach to drawing in color during
the early phases of your design process. As you become familiar with this
approach, you will find your ability to draw in color considerably expanded and,
as a result, you will be able to create your design studies more quickly and
effectively. You will also find yourself selecting—and inventing—favorite ways
of drawing in color. This is as it should be, as there is no one correct approach to
creating these drawings. Rather, you will find that your approach keeps changing
and adjusting, depending on the design communication task before you. Use the
approach—or combination of approaches—that works best for each situation. A
significant amount of new material on digital techniques has been added to this
new edition, and the presentation of this material presumes the reader has a
working knowledge of Photoshop. You may choose to incorporate some or all of
these techniques into your approach to color drawing. Or you may choose not to
use any of them. The utility of Color Drawing, third edition, does not depend on
your understanding or use of digital drawing techniques.
Most of the step-by-step drawings in the book are in perspective, but begin
with a completed line drawing. However, be assured that no amount of skill with
color can help a drawing that has a poorly drawn underlying structure or one that
demonstrates a lack of understanding of light, shade, and shadow. Perspective
and shade and shadow are the universal language of design picture making. They
form the link between you and those to whom you wish to communicate your
conceptual ideas about form, space, and, ultimately, place. In order to help you
review and recall the basic elements of design drawing, summary sheets on
perspective, line quality, shade and shadow, and illumination have been added to
the opening chapter.
If you are new to color design drawing, start at the beginning of the book,
because it is organized in a way that builds skills one step at a time, with each
succeeding chapter predicated on information supplied by those previous to it.
On the other hand, if you are more familiar with this kind of drawing, you may
wish to use the book more like a handbook, accessing materials, methods, and
techniques as needed.
Part I is an overview of the basic phenomena, media, papers, and techniques
that assist you in illustrating the various elements, materials, and finishes you
propose to use to bring your ideas to life. You illustrate them to communicate
them both to yourself and to others. Chapter 1 is an empirical introduction to the
subject, presenting the phenomena of color and light that inform the effects and
techniques used throughout the book. Chapter 2 discusses the media and papers
that work best for color design drawing. Line media and color media—including
pastels and alcohol-based markers—are introduced, as well as recommended
palettes of markers, color pencils, and pastels. Ink-jet paper has been added to a
list of papers that includes Canson paper and bond paper, all of which are
compatible with this book’s approach to color drawing. Chapter 3 shows a
variety of techniques used to apply color media and to create impressions of
materials, and now includes basic digital techniques. The “sketch/photo
combo”—hand drawing with digital color, “hybrid” color drawing, and a new
“retrocolor” technique that uses mylar are a particular focus. Chapter 4 uses
these media, paper, and techniques to create an encyclopedia of step-by-step
approaches to the illustration of elements, materials, and finishes that architects,
landscape architects, and interior designers commonly use in practice. Chapter 5
shows how to draw scale elements in color, including unique approaches to
drawing automobiles and a new way to illustrate human figures.
Part II shows how the basic skills found in Part I can be used to create a range
of drawings for presentation purposes. In addition to looking into a drawing for
design information, as Part I implicitly encourages, the designer is introduced to
ways of looking at his drawings as a graphic composition and how to provide his
drawings with visual organization and impact.
Chapter 6 shows how to consider your color design drawings as compositions
in their own right. Color relationships are discussed in terms of contrasts, and
unity, balance, proportion, and rhythm are introduced as compositional
principles to be used as tools to evaluate your drawings as you prepare them for
presentation. Chapter 7 shows step-by-step how to utilize the material covered in
the first six chapters to create a variety of kinds of color design drawings—from
quick sketches to finished presentation drawings. The first part of the chapter
covers new ways to plan your drawings, with an emphasis on value composition
as a means to creating dramatic impact. The rest of the chapter covers
approaches for creating color design drawings on a variety of papers, including
Bristol, bond, tracing paper, mylar, ink-jet paper, and toned papers such as
Canson, using both traditional line drawings and different kinds of computer
“setup” drawings. Additional layers of information found in design drawings are
also discussed, including photographs and various ways of applying notes. The
chapter closes with some recommendations for creating single-sheet and
multiple-sheet presentations. Chapter 8 has been entirely redeveloped to
introduce an approach to color drawing in which color is applied entirely by
digital means.