digital recycling

Since I chose to develop a perspective of one of my projects in my portfolio, I found it a bit difficult to break away from my work process I typically use in renderings.  Although I have a great appreciation for hand renderings, I typically shy away from drawing things by hand for presentation purposes, as I find photoshop to be more efficient and forgiving.  That being said, there is a certain character indicative of a hand drawing that rarely is evident in a clean, polished digital rendering; for the digital recycling project, I wanted to create a process that would capture a certain roughness that is found in a hand rendering. 

I began with a digitally rendered section of my project, and printed it out without altering it in anyway.  I wanted to soften the ground plane and fade it out towards the edges of the composition, so I cut out digitally rendered ground and just did some smearing of graphite to fill in the ground.

I then scanned the image in gray scale, as I found the values to be more exciting in the image when they weren't competing with the blue tint of the digital rendering.  Since the image is now entirely desaturated, in photoshop I brought some color back by adding some foliage.  After printing again, I realized I needed to poche the section cuts and ground plane to allow for the rendering to read as a section.

In illustrator I cleaned up the line work and found that I preferred a yellow poche over my sharpie's light blue.  I had some crinkeled trace paper on my desk, and wanted to give the sky some texture, so I scanned in my sheet of wrinkled trace and overlayed it on top of the rendering.  As I stretched the s smaller scanned image over top of the larger perspective, it took on a subtly noisy and pixelated appearance, which I found added another layer of texture to the image.

I then layered in some background trees and sky from some photographs I took at the site prior to construction.  Finally, in order to give the image some life and a human scale, I found in a newspaper two figures that I scanned in and dropped into the final composition.

I found a point of diminishing return rather quickly, as although I feel that each step added something to the overall character of the composition, in the end I would be satisfied with any of the images after the third piece.  The most successful of the iterations was the texture added by the trace paper in the sky; this is a method I will probably use in the future.  It also would be interesting to apply this technique to the ground as well to create an appealing texture.