I'm starting to really hit a roadblock with this project. One of the suggestions I was given was to be less literal and more abstract in my city designs. I'm fairly set on the main building I want to include but the problem is filling in the gaps between major buildings. As a milliner, Treacy's designs are not intended to be combined with each other which means when I tried to arrange several shapes he'd design into a city block it but just looked mad and jumbled.
So I tried at more abstract shapes, curves, something fro ma modern art sculpture but I do not even know if it is Treacy-like what I have come up with. One thought I had considered involves putting the central building towards the back. However this decision made me feel as if I was going backwards as it meant more thumbnails, more location and composition arrangements and more building ideas so now I feel stuck in the thumbnail stage with the end (the the final concept image) feeling very far away.
When it came to 155 I think I snapped and underwent what is described in the video game Dwarf Fortress as a "strange mood" and drew almost under automation a collection of squiggles that I then tried again with subsequent thumbnails, filling in and shading the gaps to give structure to look like modern art sculptures. Starting with 164 I also considered making the building as more of a background element which led to this feeling of going in a circle that I mentioned earlier (even if that is the design process, what kept me from doing this on Invisible Cities was I had 19 different cities to choose from as inspiration. Here I've created over 165 thumbnails for just one city and from one root).
Mark - I think you're drawing in a too-complicated way; think about working up from silhouettes - knock the detail out; my point about 'too literal' meant you'd started drawing flowers as flowers, as opposed to deriving sculptural/structural forms from flowers. Stop drawing for a moment - this method is clearly giving you nothing new - try something else: look at some natural flower forms, turn them into strong, crisp silhouettes and then 'assemble' architectural forms from the silhouettes; once you've got a strong silhouette, you can draw the detail back into the form in the knowledge that it's looking strong. Stop drawing - start assembling! And keep real architectural stuff as your reference: imagine the sidney opera house as just a silhouette - see:
ReplyDeletehttp://danadecals.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/214.jpg
simple, strong, organic, essentialised... this is what you need - not complex pencil drawings, but punchy forms; why not take Treacy's hats and turn them into an inventory of silhouettes for recombining?
Time to change up your method!