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Finished my building rendering job. Sorry I didn't follow through with the step-by-step thing - I had to burrow in and just get it done and didn't feel like stopping to scan and all that. Maybe the next one. I did like doing the different crop, and putting in a little Fall foliage. Sometimes I get pictures to work from that are covered with snow, and have to fake in the 'growie bits', but this one was easier to capture.

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Other news - I did my art show / fair this weekend, and think I've recovered. It was OK, the people running the show were lovely and the restaurants and businesses involved get an A for support, and for handing out samples of Orange Chicken and other delectables for all of us artists.

But I have to say, the flip side was that I've confirmed my feeling that art shows are not my thing. I don't particularly like sitting behind a white cloth draped table with framed and matted samples of my art, watching people slow down and smile and look, or maybe make a nice comment, then move on enthusiastically to the booth next to me with the guy selling little glass turtles he makes out of marbles.

There was one other guy there who is also an illustrator, and a really good one. He's been around a while, doing architectural illustration (the real kind, for architects and builders, of new buildings) and has had to branch out some because of the economy, and the fact that no one is building anything nowadays. It was kind of sobering to think that he and I were both trying a venue like this, just to see what would happen, when I know that in the not too distant past neither of us would even remotely consider this as a viable option for selling /getting work.

I may - no, make that will - be paring down my 6 holiday shows to, oh, one or two more that I've committed to, and that will showcase my knitting as well as art. They're both a little bit different environment, and may be more rewarding.

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Found this today:




I'm amazed that these people spend all day doing this, knowing that it will all be washed away at the end of the day. Not only could I not bear that thought, I couldn't sit all cramped up like that on a hard sidewalk for hours. So my hat (if I wore one) is off to them.)

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I also really enjoyed this article by Bruce Handy in the NYTimes about Where the Wild Things Are (the book, not the new movie).
(Illustration © Christian Northeast)


I never read the book until I was an adult, so I don't have the 'kid perspective' on it he speaks of. Interesting to think about. I only looked at it as a budding illustrator who dissected his rendering technique, more than as a good or not-so-good children's story.
I also love Maurice Sendak's recent comment telling parents who think the movie is too scary to "go to hell". How refreshing! Especially in the 'nicey-nice' children's book world, where you don't generally hear that kind of thing.
Just saying.

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Its raining cats and dogs here, wow. It went from way too hot to this in no time flat. What happened to Fall? I see one of my too-tall rose bushes has already succumbed to the wind, and has a large branch broken and hanging sadly lawn-wise. I had planned to go out today for a little R&R, but maybe I'll rethink that. This is one of those days where people who have good sense just hunker down and stay inside until it passes. I am worried about my little wild kitty friend who comes to eat every day and is usually waiting on the back porch for the cat door to open in the morning. He's a no show today, and I wonder where he's tucked in - hopefully somewhere dry and warm. He'll be hungry when he does make an appearance, I'm sure!

Finished this one today. Sent it off to the client, so feel OK sharing. This one was a challenge, but think I pulled it off. Its all colored pencils, and some of it has oil on it like in my most recent pieces.


Not sure how professional this is, but I will share what my drawing table looked like today (and looks like often). You can see the above illustration nestled down right beneath the triangle and photo and sheet of white paper. The rest of the board is pretty much covered with cats!



That's my Shmoopie on the left on her little towel set-up. And my Charlie on the right. Since my table is at an angle he often slides down, so most of the time I'm drawing with one hand, and holding him up and off the same drawing with the other hand! I know, its crazy, what can I say.
Shmoopie has a little 'bumper' of towels that keep her in place (and notice how she hasn't moved from one picture to the other ~ she's very statue-like.)



The turkey is back too! Bless his (or her) little heart. I sort of shooed it away the other night, and got a lump in my throat as I watched it trot off down the sidewalk (remember, I'm in a regular residential neighborhood, with houses and lawns and driveways ~ not a farm or anything), because it looked so forlorn and lost and out of place. But I decided it could be someone else's problem.

Then today it was back, strutting and pecking and scratching around in my backyard, so I had mixed emotions ~ relief that it was OK and hadn't become someone's dinner, and annoyance that its chosen MY yard. I did some googling and found out they just forage for seeds and grasses and acorns and stuff, and are actually pretty clever about finding food and all, so I guess I'll just leave him be for now and see what happens.

I also ordered myself this book today:

This is a building rendering, obviously. A little job I just finished.
Colored pencil on bristol. About 8 x 10.



And this is what happens when I get up from my drawing table to make coffee or have lunch or read email.
I come back to a Wendell fast asleep on my chair (although in real life he's not blurry.)



Of course I never have the heart to kick him off, so I roll the chair to the side and go get another hard uncomfortable dining room chair for me to sit on until he decides to move.
He's been doing really well since he came home from the hospital. No leaking!
Fingers crossed he stays that way.

And last night this one switched from "down at the foot of the bed with his head on my feet" to "right up next to me with his head on the PILLOW" while I was reading. I know, too cute, huh?

And on we go...

I combined a bunch of steps here because I was lazy and didn't feel like getting up and scanning for each one.



I added a wash of Transparent Brown Oxide over the bricks to tone them down a bit more.
I did those 4 windows up top with the same colors as the sky, since they're reflecting sky.
I did that little narrow band on top of the roof with a combination of Olive Green and a touch of Charcoal Grey.
I did the big windows with a combination of Charcoal Grey and Payne's Grey, with a little olive and some blues worked in for some variation, although they don't really show. I don't want to show any specific reflections here, so I just went with "dark". At this size, that works well, I've learned from experience.



I keep forgetting that bit to the right. I went back in and did the windows. In the photo it looks like that part is set back just a little bit, and also like there is a glass door there. So I made it look slightly different. I'll tone down this part some later on so it sets back a little.

I also added a light wash to the roof. In the photo its really washed out, and its difficult to tell what color it really is. So I made it pale blue grey, using the palette I already have going. I'll add the "stripes" to it later, maybe with pencil.

I also put a grey wash down at the bottom to establish the sidewalk and a bit of parking lot in front. I left the area where the plants are going to be blank.

OK, back to work!!!

All images are © Paula Pertile and may not be used or reproduced for any reason.

This is my newest project: rendering this building for a magazine.

What a terrible photo! Its distorted, the very tip top is cut off, and its snowing!!! This is typical of what I get to work from. (No offense to my nice art director who has to go out on site in the middle of his day and snap some photos for me ~ I know its not easy!) But you can see that these are not fancy pictures taken with a tripod and nice lighting, and I have absolutely no control over this part of the project. I just have to do the best I can with what they give me.

I've actually rendered this building before when it was called something else, but I'd forgotten until I saw the pictures (yes, there's more than one picture, and this one is the best, believe it or not). Even though I guess I could just try to Photoshop the new signage over the old illustration, I prefer to do a fresh piece.

So stay tuned, I'll blog it as I go along here.

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In other news, Wendell the kitty should be coming home from the kitty hospital later today. He's been there 3 days with a urinary catheter and IV and has been completely miserable, poor little guy. I visited him every day (twice yesterday) and tried to cheer him up, but it didn't help too much. I just can't wait to get him home where I'm hoping he'll recover quickly.

If you're in the Sacramento area and need a top notch place to take your dog or cat, go to VCA. They are AMAZINGly wonderful, have 24 hour emergency care, and are just so darned nice to your pet while he or she is there. I can't say enough nice things about it.

And I have a new one. A ratty looking, very sweet tomcat who's adopted us. Next week he goes in to get snipped and poked with vaccines. He's so new I don't even have a name for him yet! Sometimes they're easy to name, sometimes not, you know? This one's eluding me a bit. I walk around the house going "hey Bartholomew (no), hey Samuel (no), hey Degas (NO)...". It takes about 1,000 tries and one will finally 'fit'. Wendell took a while, but once I hit on that one, it really stuck. We'll see!

Crazy Cat Lady signing off for now... Read the rest of this post

Aren't you glad?

I'm just going to do a 'ta-dah', here it is thing:



I punched up the values in the roof, the green band and warming hut, and shadows and sidewalk...well, everything but the trees, pretty much.
I added the tile to the roof with paint, but did the details like the address, the lights, a couple other things with colored pencil.
I didn't fuss with the trees because I don't want you to look there. I left them simple, and put all the detail on the building, because I want the viewer to look past the trees and at the restaurant.

I'm happy with it, and hope the client is too!!!!

This was a very simple example of architectural rendering. The people who get paid the really big bucks take architectural floor plans and elevations and using complicated methods, construct a 3D image of the building, THEN do an awesome rendering of it after that!

My little piece didn't have any people in it, nor do most "building portraits", which is what this is. Building portraits are usually nice renderings of someone's home or maybe place of business, or maybe model homes for realtors, things like that.

Rendering by Augustus M. Higginson


More advanced architectural rendering, which is done to show a building that hasn't been constructed yet, usually shows people (but not always) to show scale and the way a place will be used.

Here are a few links to people who do this for a living. There are about a million gazillion others ~ I just picked a few I know of out of a hat.
Frank Constantino
Bay Illustration
Michael Abbott

For a longer list, go here:
American Society of Architectural Illustrators
Or you can google "Architectural Rendering" or "Architectural Illustration" and get tons more. You could spend days looking at cool illustrations of buildings! (Well, I could.)

or, "The work-in-progress blog post with really badly spliced together scans".
I figured you'd all forgive me, right?
Thanks.

OK, so you remember we're doing a little rendering of this restaurant, Table 52.

I had the line drawing all worked out and transferred to the paper.
Now its time to color!

I forgot to tell you this is being done at 8.5 x 10.5 inches, but will be reproduced roughly the size you see here (half the size I'm painting it).
So I'm keeping the rendering fairly simple. If this were for a different application, like, a formal painting of the restaurant that was going to be framed and hung on the wall, I would do everything I've done up to this point the same exact way. But I would do it bigger, and I would take much more time with the painting and put in a lot more fussy detail. I would also have better pictures to work with, and would have much more input from the owner, I imagine.

But for what this is being used for, this is how I'm doing it.

I'm using Windsor & Newton, Holbein, and Daniel Smith watercolors.
I started with the sky. Horizon Blue and Blue Grey washed on casually, not trying too hard to "make a sky", but letting the paint just flow together and do its thing.
I also did a pale wash on the sidewalk and ground all around.

Next the roof. I did the main parts with Payne's Grey and Neutral Tint, then the border bits with Moonglow and Charcoal Grey.
I also added a little color to the tree trunks and the bricks around their bases. I'm trying to start tying the colors together a bit.

The green band and the "warming hut" were done with Oxide of Chromium and Green Grey.

I did quite a bit on this step. I did the doors with Burnt Sienna and Transparent Brown Oxide.
Then I added in the window panes with Payne's Grey (hey...the panes were done with Payne's...cool!) and Charcoal Grey, kind of letting them each be a little different.
I also added layers of greys on the sidewalk and street, and around the sides of the building.
And some shadows on the building itself.

Then the trees. I used Permanent Sap Green and some Yellow Grey. Then I lost track...I just started fiddling some with the whole piece, adding more shadow, more to the tree trunks, etc.


So this is how the rendering is shaping up compared to the original photo.

Its much brighter (the photo was taken with no sun, no shadows, bad light, etc.).
I've taken out the snow and Christmas lights and greenery and replaced that with Spring trees and no snow and different greenery in the planters.

This isn't finished, obviously. I need to finish the roof tiles, add the little lights on the building, the address, a few other tidbits. But this let's me see what parts are working and what might need to be adjusted.
I'm going to let it rest overnight and finish it up tomorrow. Nothing like getting away from something for a while to see it with fresh eyes.

Continuing on with creating an illustration of Table 52 in Chicago...

I taped this photo onto my lightbox and did a first trace, establishing the main lines of the building. I straightened up the distortion in the photo (its slight, but its there... the verticals in photos are rarely all truly vertical.)

I took out all the "uglies" that I mentioned in the last post.

I moved the middle tree to the right just a bit so the pretty window would show better. This also had the added benefit of hiding a bit of the "warming hut".
Then I did a really bold thing and added a tree that isn't even there on the right side!
Before I did that I stared at that side of the building and pondered how on earth to show the fire escape and fiddly bits of pipes and all, then also how to show that whole basically dead area.

"Why don't you just crop the whole piece and take that side off altogether?" you ask. Good question. Two things: 1. It needs to be there to balance out the rest of the piece and 2. because I'm doing this for a magazine and there is a size specification, I have to include exactly what I have in the picture to make the size work.
The added tree is in keeping with the two that are already there, and I honestly don't think anyone's going to have an issue with it. This is a case where that "artistic license" we all carry around comes in handy. You just have to know when and how to use it.

So now that I have the composition basically worked out to my satisfaction, I do another trace, tightening things up a bit, cleaning up the linework and adding a few more details.


I forgot to say before that I also took out the buildings in the background. Sometimes I leave them in, it depends. If a building is flanked by others, up close, or if the surrounding buildings help establish where this one "lives", or for some other good reason, I will leave them in, and maybe fade them out some.
In this case, the surrounding architecture does nothing to enhance this one, and also, this one is kind of 'stand alone' anyway, so I decided it didn't need any company on the page.

Also, the trees will be very "light" in feeling. I don't want them to overwhelm the picture. I will be taking out the snow in the photo as well, and putting Spring leaves on the trees (and taking out the Christmas lights they currently have wrapped around them). So the overall feel of the piece will be much different than the photo.


Next I put that last sketch on the light box and transfer the drawing to my final paper.
I'm using Lanaquarelle watercolor paper. I darkened the drawing up in Photoshop to show here. In reality its much much lighter, and so is the paper. But it does have a warmish cast to it, which will work nicely with the whole feel of the piece.

The next thing to do is choose a palette and start painting!

All images and content herein are © Paula Pertile and may not be used or reproduced without permission.

And now for something completely different!

Today I want to talk about architectural rendering a little bit. I have a new commission to do a rendering of a restaurant in Chicago, so thought I'd start a work in progress series of posts about it, and also yak about rendering buildings in general some.

This is the photo I will be turning into a nice illustration:



Its Table fifty-two, and is the creation of Chef Art Smith, who just happens to be Oprah's personal chef.

Rendering buildings is a highly specialized field of art. The range of styles, techniques and applications for illustrating architecture is much too much to try to write about in a blog! What I'll do is show you a little of what I do, take you through the process of rendering this piece, then give you some links to places where you can see other illustrators' work. This will take a few posts, at least, I figure!

First up are a few samples of other buildings I've done. I vary my style quite a bit, as you can see.

Ink and watercolor

Colored pencil
Ink and watercolor

Watercolor

Colored pencil and Photoshop

Sometimes the client will ask for something specific. If not, I let the building "tell me" what style and technique to use.

For Table 52, I'm thinking I might use a combination of watercolor and pencil. Its a very elegant space, and a tighter, neater style would work best to bring out the character of the building.

I start with a series of photos my art director sends me. He goes out to the location and takes pictures of the sight. I ask him to take shots of the building from different angles, some close up details, the more the better. The main photo I'll be working from is the correct angle, but I can't see the detail in the windows very well because of the tree, I can't see what's in the planter box in front, etc. etc.


So in addition to this photo I have about a half dozen others that show a lot more information.

We talked about the pictures and discussed what was important to show, and what could be removed, and in general how to make it a good illustration.

Here is my first take on the things that need to be removed from the picture:

The parking sign out front HAS to go! I always take out signs like that. Ugly!
Also, the power lines on the left, the crane on the right, and of course the truck and some of the meters and whatnot attached to the side of the building.

We talked about the green canopy tent structure in front. That's a temporary structure put up to shelter people who are waiting to get in, from the weather, which is very civilized (the structure, not the weather). It comes down once the weather warms up. But as much as I'd like to remove it, I don't know what the window and door look like underneath, and don't want to just invent something, or "fake it". Looking at the interior shot of the place on the website tells me some of what the window does, but not the door. And since I'm not there to go look in person, and my art director isn't able to go back and take more pictures, we'll have to just settle with what we have to work with. I will include the "warming hut" in the illustration and make it look as nice as possible (luckily its very tastefully done so it won't be hard!)


Now let me go work on this, and I'll post the next steps as soon as I have something to show!

All images and content herein are © Paula Pertile and may not be used or reproduced without permission.

Yesterday, I drove two hours to visit my dear friend Linda Gray, and her classroom of 15 first graders at the Center Drive School in Orrington, Maine.  We had the best time!

I gave my usual writing talk about idea gathering, and how we shape them.  Then I illustrate it by showing them how one bad day of B's, turned into this:





Afterwards, we did a writing prompt and shared our work.  This class had their imagination caps on . . . on . . .on!!! 
They finished this particular prompt in ways, even I hadn't imagined!  

Linda, you have one amazing group of kids there!

One of these super thinkers gave me a precious gift:



Awwwww!  Her note had me smiling  the whole two hour drive home.

I'm heading north to visit a dear friends classroom today! 

There's nothing I like better than talking to first graders about idea gathering.  They always come up with the most creative ideas . . .

I spent a wonderful day with the children of Pierce Elementary School in Bennington, NH. We had a great time getting to know each other and I had a chance to show the students some of the ins and outs of digital artwork. Along the way we read from 'Princess Caitlin's Tiara' and 'The Adventures of Cali.' I brought along my own Princess Tiara to wear, just (well almost) like Caitlin's, and each child who listened to the story about Cali got to take home a Cali finger puppet. The one that I made is from cardstock, but the one that will be presented when the books come out later this summer will look like the fuzzy one shown here next to Cali's book cover.

I was really impressed with the attention, interest, and teriffic good manners of all the children!

What a fabulous Friday!  Storyteller and author Joseph Bruchac visited my school for a presentation to our sixth and seventh graders this afternoon.   I am in awe of this man, who kept 200 middle school kids spellbound for an hour and fifteen minutes.  I can't say I was surprised, though. If you've ever heard Joe Bruchac speak, you know what a captivating storyteller he is.

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Joe's message, for the kids and all of us, is to honor the stories that are  part of our lives.  Stories can teach us, keep us safe, and give us courage when we need it the most.  My class had just finished listening to SKELETON MAN as a spooky read-aloud this morning (nothing like cutting it close), so the kids loved asking questions about the book right away.  They're working on their own fictional pieces now and relished the opportunity to chat with such a prolific author about his writing practices. Joe's advice to writers, young and old, won't come as a surprise:  If you want to write, spend lots of time writing. If you want people to read what you have written, spend lots of time rewriting.  Joe's latest book, BEARWALKER, is due out from Harper Collins in July.