live brief

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i decided to pick the andrew martin brief from the option allocated to us. i did this as i enjoy researching what i draw, and i also like drawing buildings and architecture. it’s a challenging but stimulating task that i thought that i would get a lot out of, regardless of the outcome.

we were tasked with researching five prominent architectural designers that the andrew martin firm considered the greatest of all time, and create illustrations that would be turned into a pop-up book for them.

this is a great weight. whatever we do will have to done with this fact kept in mind in regards to both the style of illustration and the way the buildings will fold out on the page.

i thought a lot about architechural drawings, and being able to preserve both the integral details while stylising the illustrations themselves. i talked to my friend yashani who has a degree in architechture. she told me to check out her instagram portfolio for her own illustrations alongside the classic planning institute.

i liked her sketches, especially the building above. its drawn with wobbly linework but it still conveys perfectly.

i looked into the classic planning institute, and found this article on their website.

after this initial background exploration, i created a miro board to collate reference images. this miro board hosts a large proportion of the research and exploration that i ended up doing for this project.

please view it here:

https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVIJI0jLQ=/?share_link_id=950463060722

all of the sources for my research of all of the buildings are also collated on there, next to their respective sections.

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the parthenon

i looked into the parthenon, and how it came to be. i did a few studies to become more familiar with the architechture and how each aspect holds eachother up. i used indian ink and zig kurecolor ink to add colour.

i talked to my friend kiedis to find out more about the pediment and the stories that it tells on the east and west sides. phidias was in charge of both the architechure of the whole structure as well as the “parthenon frieze”.

alariko

i also looked into the artist alariko, who specialises in drawing buildings digitally. i have been a fan of him for a long time, and the way he captures the humanity that is built into a structure is incredible. i was particularly enamoured with these two images which i will show below as i got a lot out of them throughout the entire brief.

thumbnailing

i thought about what angle to take for the main pop-up illustration. this was especially hard as i had to look across multiple images to get the right angles to produce an accurate image. i came up with a few potential concepts for the final illustration, which are all discussed on the page above.

i also used 3d models of the parthenon to aid me. this helped immensely as i could manipulate the model into any angle i wanted to view it at. here is one of the models that i referenced.

i liked this particular angle as it highlighted the cliff that the parthenon was built ontop of. the height of the building was notable as the parthenon housed the statue of athena, who was considered the “protector” of athens. thus, it seemed like a good idea to take this skewed perspective.

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the summer palace of kublai khan

for me, this was personally the hardest one out of the five. it was hard to get the right kind of reference images and angles that i wanted, as there wasn’t a whole lot of images out there of the palace. i picked three possible concepts for the illustration:

> scene with water + stone boats (a wide angle shot of the entire estate with the boats in the foreground)
> main hexagonal building
> twisting courtyard (at night?)

liu bingzhou was in charge of the contstruction of the entire estate. so i felt it was nessecary to highlight as much of it in it’s entirety as possible.

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interlude – pop up books

while i was coming up with concepts for the palace of kublai khan illustration, i realised i was missing key knowledge on the mechanics of pop-up books and their construction.

i looked into the pop-up book that andrew martin had referred to in the intial proposal: the jungle book

i took particular note of how the longer structures folded out of the book, and how it manages to convey depth despite the flat medium.

from this i went looking for material on buildings, from which i found this video documenting the pop-ups in this 1962 publication of Marco Polo.

this one in particular gave me inspiration for the michaelangelo illustration, which i build on later on.

and finally, this video by the pop-up channel was a goldmine. it gave me inspiration for how to lay out the illustration of kublai khan’s palace.

the last two images in particular were instrumental in deciding how to lay out the illustration effectively. i loved how it worked; it felt genius in my mind. alongside the obvious pop-up knowledge, the illustration in this book in particular is beautiful. it feels purposed, despite the lack of “detail”. it captures everything it needs to perfectly, which is what i was aiming to do in my own works.

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the summer palace of kublai khan – reprise

i based my concept off of the layout of the daily express’ childrens annual that was showcased in the pop-up channel’s video (last two images from that section above).

i then went into procreate to attempt at drawing the main hexagonal building.

i started off by trialling rendering techniques to see what brush would work best. i trialled both a “sketching” brush and a “line” brush to compare a more cartoon-y approach and a more painterly rendering style. i used the front panel of the roof for this test. i liked how the painterly style helped to give dimention to the building, which was integral to me as the actual building is intensely intricate.

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the sistine chapel

this specific choice of designer and subject was actually tipping point on why i chose this brief. i had remembered saving this particular photo of the Hermès Pop-Up Book and thinking that it would match the ceiling of the chapel (noted above).

despite my want to this concept, i was also sadly aware of how insane it would be to redraw the entirety of the sistine chapel for a brief. it would take an inordinate amount of time to do this.

to see the feasibility of this, i tested the difficulty by attempting to recreate a portion of “the last judgement” that covers the altar wall in the sistine chapel.

i realised that i would have to backpaint to illustrate this, as if i was oil painting digitially. and although this particular test didn’t take an inordinate amount of time, the ceiling has over 300 painted figures on it. i wasn’t sure if i would have time do do this alongside the other illustrations in time for the presentation to the clients.

i then went back to my initial concepts and picked out the scene “god creates adam” to illustrate instead.

this particular image is probably considered the most famous part of the mural. it’s refrenced heavily in modern culture, so it only made sense that it would have to be in the book somewhere.

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the downfall

when choosing which of the five to do first, i’m sure it’d probably be agreed to not start with michaelangelo. This is how i compleletly messed up the entire project

i spent an inordinate amount of time rendering this piece. i consider myself good at digital rendering, but i am completely unversed in the language of realistic anatomy, let alone male anatomy. i became obsessed with it.

the more i worked on it the more futile i realised it would be. because there was no point leaving it unfinished but i couldn’t abandon it when i was in the flow. i realised i would have no time to finish rendering the background characters also. and then it all just kept adding up. and then i got stressed. and then i didn’t turn up to the presentation pitches that were scheduled. all i had to show was this dumb piece.

anyway here’s the timelapse replay gif and the final finished version.

This piece is so lacklustre it hurts. the parts i like the most are definitely the linework on the curly hair. i had a lot of fun drawing it. and i enjoyed rendering “god”. but i can’t help but resent it, and myself a little bit for allowing this tunnel vision to happen.