Possumblog

Ooooh, pretty!

Yet another task by the wayside--this one might be interesting to you. Or not. But it does involve more pictures, so there is that.

Well, now, let's say you're a non-profit environmental group, and you're located in a midsized Southern city named after Great Britain's second largest city, and let's say you run a downtown dropoff center for people to bring their recyclables, and the place looks pretty dumpy, and you want to spiff things up a bit. You think things will be fine, because you want it to be nicer than it was, but there are those ding-derned bureaucrats and citizen busybodies you have to satisfy, and they aren't quite thrilled with your first attempt at picking a color, and not only that, they want you to make a drawing showing what it's going to look like.

YOU, not having such expertise, are at a loss--until it is suggested that there exists yet another bureaucrat who might be able to help you out.

SO, you send him the only picture you have, and drop off some color chips for him--

Now then, if I was a real person, and this was a real proposal, and not something completely made-up, whose only similarity to actual locations, persons, or events was only coincidental, and if I had my way, I would have Photoshop on my computer, and this would get kicked out in about five minutes. As it is, I don't have that, nor do I have much of anything else other than all that old-timey stuff of tracing paper and pencils and pens. Thankfully, I do have a copier I can use.

Anyway, first step is to get the picture somewhat bigger, and then do an ink outline on tracing paper of the major parts of the building. With raggedy digital photo enlargement, it sometimes helps to go over the printed photo with a Sharpie around the edges so you don't lose them in the background.

You wind up with something like this--

Next, colors.

For this one, I decided to use colored pencils. If I'm doing a sketch of something conceptual, I usually use markers, because they're fast and bold and loose-looking and disguise a lot of "and a miracle happens here" type stuff.

Colored pencils are better when you're trying to match an exact color, and are much more controlled in their application to the surface. The only problem is that they're slow. Obviously, there isn't a colored pencil in the exact shade you need, so you have to use several and build up a reasonable match to what you're looking at on the paint chip. The advantage to this is the color has a nice layered look and it's easy to differentiate materials more easily than with markers. One minor thing to remember, too, is that you can't go lighter. Once something is too dark, it's too dark forever. So you have to gradually build up shades starting with overlapping levels of light colors, then move to darker ones. Oh, and you have to apply each layer in the same direction, or it starts looking like a little kid did it.

The first thing to do was the big sidewall where the old nappy-looking mural was. They had originally wanted this to be a buff color (along with the rest of the building in the foreground) but the suggestion was made that it would be better to paint this wall a dark color to match the color of the brick facade (not shown in the photo, it's to your right). It took the six pencils shown, and about forty-five minutes of careful scribbling. The foreground building has just had a first application of a cream color as a base.

Much later, after more layers of color, and after coming back in with some final strokes with a fine point Sharpie to put in reflections and texture and scribbly things that look like background, you wind up with something like this (the color chips I was trying to match are there on the left)--

And that's pretty much it.

Posted by Terry Oglesby at August 15, 2005 03:51 PM