One of my required classes for Interior Design necessitated developing skills with pen and ink, pencil, pastel pencils, watercolors, colored pencils, and colored markers.
By LINDA BROOKS
For The Pioneer
One of my required classes for Interior Design necessitated developing skills with pen and ink, pencil, pastel pencils, watercolors, colored pencils, and colored markers. This skill is called rendering – a representation of a building or interior in perspective, usually done for the purposes of presentation.
Louis Sullivan, (1856-1924), known as the Father of modern American architecture, was a master of freehand drawing. One of his under studies was Frank Lloyd Wright who was an accomplished renderer – he drew countless buildings incorporating great detail.
A well known architect, painter, writer and architectural critic, LeCorbusier - (pseudonym for Charles Edouard Jenneret) penned these words – “with color you accentuate, you classify, you disentangle. With black you get stuck in the mud and you are lost. Always say to yourself: Drawings must be easy to read. Color will come to your rescue”.
Here are some of the different mediums I worked with, developed my rendering skills.
Pen & Ink – this project involved choosing a photo and rendering it in ink in three separate ways – with dots, stripes and circles. The more dots one used the more solid the objects appear, fewer circles read as lighter space, and the close spacing of stripes indicated mass.
Colored pencils – here we worked with all the colors of the rainbow. Requirements were to do hours of drawing to hone our skills. One of my choices was an Amish quilt done in corduroy in dark colors with a black border. We see the tones of the colors by the pressure applied to the pencil – tone on tone.
Watercolors – these inks require the addition of water. We chose a picture and marked it from light to dark – the lightest shades were applied first and then the darker shades of color were added. The paper we used was immersed in water and then taped down with a waterproof tape – this allows for the leaching aspect of colors and keeps the paper from curling as it dries. Watercolor is a very difficult medium to work with as it is not easily controlled. One must learn to work with bold strokes and to see the blending of layer upon layer of color.
Pencil – our professors indicated which medium we would use for our sketch books – these were done out of class, one professor told us that we should figure on drawing two hours outside of class for every hour in class. Pencil allows for the gentle manipulation of light & dark and shade & shadow. Our pencil drawings were done on many different types of paper – black construction, tag board, cardboard, vellum (a parchment like paper) and trash paper (a tissue paper).
Colored markers – these are like watercolors in that they can bleed depending on the type of paper used. They are translucent (you can see through them) so they are often used with colored pencils. The copper shown in my rendering makes use of both.
One of the jobs on the market for Interior Designers is Rendering – it requires skills in all these areas and I know of people who render all day long for the companies that employ them.
An area I have not covered is computer aided rendering – it is used by many companies but what happens if the computers go down? Hand rendering is a skill worth owning.
I hope you have enjoyed looking into some of the skills I had to develop for my Interior Design training.
Linda Brooks, owner of Design Consulting, has an Interior Design Degree from NDSU. She lives in Bowman. She can be contacted at [email protected]. You can view her blog through the community links section on the Pioneer’s website, www.bowmanextra.com.