The Half-a-House

This is an interesting little project I am working on in Rockport, Maine. This house use to be a full cape but about 30 years ago (so the story goes) two brothers inherited the house and decided to split it - literally. One brother took his half of the house across town and the other one lived here. It's less than 1000 SF and either needs to be torn down or completely renovated.

The sketch on top was done on my Cintiq tablet. I designed the porch addition in Sketchup, a cool 3D modelling program from Google, then rendered it in another program named Piranesi. This program is amazing. It's like Photoshop in 3D. Each pixel in the exported epix file from Sketchup has material and distance-in-space information so you can just lock the planes or material and paint away without worrying about masking areas. Entourage such as cars, people, plants, etc comes into the drawing at the proper height depending on where in the image it is placed. It is really fast. This sketch was done in about 2 hours and I hit the undo button a lot! Once I was happy with it, I brought it into Artrage for some final tweaks.

I wish the renovation was going to be that easy!

Back to Morocco

I still have a bunch of sketches from Morocco that I haven't posted. This one was inspired by a painting in the riad we stayed at in Marrakech. I usually use pen with watercolor so this was a departure for me. The original is full color. I was just playing around with this color focus effect in Picasa and liked it.

The Gulf

I really didn't intend to be gone this long from sketching and blogging. It's actually been kind of nice though. My energy and focus has been directed at renovating my kitchen and dining room. I usually design these things for other people so it has been really nice to not only design it but do most of the building as well (I was a builder in my previous life). It's almost finished and it's turning out really cool. Perhaps I'll post some photos when it gets done.

Anyway, this sketch is of a gas station up near Stonington, Maine. I snapped a photo of it on a bike ride with Valerie over the fourth of July weekend last summer and this winter I sketched it in my Moleskine. Today I was watching the news about this oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico (I hate that they keep calling this a "spill") I'm not behind the scenes there but it seems to me that the world is expecting way too much from British Petroleum. There should be a global response like none other to contain this thing. It just seems like there is not enough outrage about this disaster. Well, I am outraged and this is my little drawing.

So there.