Self-Portrait Composition

Introduction

The self-portrait composition will take your graphic and conceptual abilities to the next level.

We will be starting off with a couple of standard objects from which we will get the building blocks of our composition… then add out own ideas on top of that and finish everything off with hatching in coloured crayons.

The Building Blocks

Creativity doesn’t mean you come up with things out of the blue… but rather that you are able to use pre-existing elements and shape them towards your vision.

We will be dealing here with:
• Two famous buildings designed by two famous architects – ZahaHadid and Renzo Piano.
• Two of your favourite books (on architecture or misc)
and most importantly…

Concept Generation

We will spend 20 minutes at most to generate a concept for our composition. This is quite important as in drawing it is not enough to just stick to the conventional.

You need to systematically complicate your drawing by adding more layers of ‘juicy creativeness’ as well as make the whole composition simple so as to represent in drawing.

Drawing The Writing

When drawing in composition is not like you are just doing handwriting… you need to construct your writing in perspective just like every other volume you would construct in perspective – with perspective points as well as cast shadows and shadowed faces.

The only difference from a simple block is that you need to add style to it… so I recommend you go for a special font as
well… you know just to squeeze more creativity out of it.

Line Drawing

Again, we will use a large, crisp, confident line drawing starting off from the basic thumbnail sketch and then add more and more detail as we move on.

We will be doing everything by freehand with the focus of filling up the page with as much info as possible. Obviously, this will be done within common sense – vertical lines still need to be perpendicular on the horizon line, beware of perspective deformations.

Detailing = moving as far away as possible from standard box perspectives or any other type of primitive volume, sculpting in as much information as possible onto our perspectives.

So we will go for standard construction lines following the general concept in our thumbnail sketch progression.

Again, this will not translate perfectly as drawing a larger drawing tends to create all sorts of complications, since the thumbnail concept will change and evolve into something else.

Then we start with the detailing… and as time permits we need to detail all volumes starting with the most important ones: adding as much information and detailing to the foreground, then maybe to the vertical dominant and some other important object in your composition.

We also need to over-thicken the contour lines, so we get a drawing that will actually look good when hatched.

Keep all vertical lines as close to perpendicular to the horizon line as possible!

After detailing is done and finished, then we grab a ruler or triangle and start thickening lines.

Cast Shadows

Cast shadows are a must so do not forget to draw them with a60degrees triangle and a horizontal!

Over thicken the cast shadow silhouettes so to get clarity in your drawing before moving on to the next stage.

Coloring

We will use the 80/20 principle in colouring… so we will start off colouring the whole composition with one colour then start adding accents with another complementary or opposite colour.

Colour One:
Will get the drawing looking ‘ok’, so we will have all the shadows hatched with this colour, all the materials (same as with a crayon drawing).

SpeedUp 

Difficulty: Noobie to Intermediate

Video Time: 2:00:55

In this video you will learn about how to correctly construct a detailed isometric axonometric at line-drawing level. This exercise will continue in the next lesson with adding cast and volume shadows.

• Develop the concept, then focus 100% on making it look good. In arch drawing concept and graphics mix together and to be honest you can have very good results with a decent concept that has excellent graphics.
• Draw a large drawing and apply everything we learned until now – construction lines, basic graphics, cast and volume shadows.

• You will over-think the concept part by waiting for the ‘perfect idea’, perfect concept etc. That does not work – what you need is to get the first set of ideas you have on paper and develope those by sketching them.
• Do not forget that half of this lesson is about concept and half is about graphics. The graphics part is fairly linear – you only need to draw large volumes and use just one color to draw the whole drawing.

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