Imagined Spaces Project

These are the beginnings of a potential project I will keep working on. It started as an exercise to get me working on art/drawing, so I picked something I know I like doing, which is making designs/floorplans/sketches for imagined spaces. Specifically, since I did this assignment in high school a few times (making floor plans for a house/building), I have always enjoyed thinking about what my 'dream' apartment or house would be.. with these sketches (and the start to the digital piece), I've been thinking about my 'dream' space, but more within realistic financial limitations; so, these images are for an imagined small, 1-person 1-bedroom apartment unit. I have some more floorplans for larger, possibly 2-person units which I will post as soon as I get them scanned.

Oh, and I kept these scans as they looked, the sketchbook visible and no touch-ups, 'cuz I like how they look (okay, yes, I am sort of just skipping that part because I don't feel like doing it.. but I DO like seeing sketches in original form. The lighting is mostly close to the originals on these, too, as far as I wasn't working under a glaring desk lamp that would have washed it out; sometimes when I do some Photoshop lighting adjustment, it blasts out the little scratches and eraser marks that I think add character).

Venice and Paris Blind Contour Sketches

The second round of combining-ation, this time with sketches from Venice and Paris.

Blind Contour Sketches of Florence

Okay, so my brother and I traveled for two weeks after finishing our semester abroad at the Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan, Ireland.

I did in fact have my sketchbook with me, but I didn't do a ton of sketching. What I did do, I am currently putting all on one page (one page per section of the trip). This is the page for Florence, Italy (the place that we spent the most time, about four days, with a wonderful host and friend).

Most of those doodles are blind-contour drawings. I tried picking a colored-pencil to convey the mood of the place that I was when I decided to do the drawings. The phrase, "A guy kicked it" is referring to somebody kicking that glass bottle that I was drawing (it was the night before Labor Day, and there was MASSIVE celebration on the streets, so crowded that you had to push and shove your way through to get anywhere; and so glass bottles left on the ground would just get kicked around, sometimes breaking into pieces).

More to come soon of the other places, which yielded less sketches (perhaps because I felt more rushed in the other places, having only a day or two in Venice, Weimar, and Paris, as opposed to four in Florence. We visited London and Brighton at the start and end of our trips, but I felt too focused on scheduling and meeting friends at the start of the trip, and at the end, too tired :P ).

PS. Here is a link to the Flickr set (see bottom of paragraph), of more than 1300 photos, taken by both of us (see tags for who took which photo), from those two weeks traveling afterward. It includes photos of the 'sights/sites' that you're supposed to go see, plus a handful of more random, sometimes more blurry, shots of just walking around. Also a ton of photos of book covers and some shots inside books, as we spent a lot of time in bookstores, especially in the children's illustrated book sections. (We took home maybe a dozen books, mostly smaller. One of my favorite illustrators as a kid, Sven Nordquist, had a newer book that was pretty large in terms of length and width, but we decided we had to squeeze that one home, and so did. He was famous for the Festus and Mercury books, or known in their native place as Findus and Pettson. Here is a link to the book we got, which was not related to Findus and Pettson, but still extremely awesome in its level of detail and color on each page: http://www.amazon.com/ist-meine-Schwester-Sven-Nordqvist/dp/3789169404/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_9 )

And here's the link to the Flickr set I spake of above:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/15978133@N00/sets/72157626583212207/