Painting Architecture: Mechanical Landscapes
Alex Kaiser

Intermediate - Winter 2012

Second Floor Back-
32 Bedford Square
Wednesdays 10am-1pm

 

“I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.”

– Pablo Picasso

 

Whatever happened to painting? No, not painting as in writing computer scripts to manipulate pixels in an automatic and generative fashion, not painting as in connecting mathematical software applications to CAD packages, but real painting: the creation of well-balanced, well-proportioned lines and curves and fields that represent actual or dreamt-up scenarios, compositions that are printed out as plates that you can keep in a portfolio and take out whenever you feel like tracing one of those lines or curves with your finger?

The art of crafting an architectural painting seems to have vanished in a digital smudge of Rhino scripting and Maya blobs. Whilst recognising the value of contemporary software packages, this course argues that the lust for line is not dead, that a basic understanding of traditional drawing and painting methods can be fused with contemporary 3D packages to quickly and efficiently create new and innovative spatial constructs, ideas and sequences.

Our paintings will start out as references which we will re-paint, collage and deconstruct, but will then evolve into finished pieces though experimental brushwork, serendipitous thumbnailing, orthographic painting, 3D modelling, value sketching, and digital overlaying. Students are given a greater understanding of how materials, light, form, shadows, and perspectives work in order to re-create these better on the pictorial plane. Not only will we be designing through painting, we will be discovering the design through painting.

 

Image: Course
Image Credit: Alex Kaiser
    • Session 1: Wednesday 11th Jan:

    • -Experimental brush/line/collage techniques
      -Fast thumbnail ideation
      -Orthographic painting and composition

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    • Session 2: Wednesday 18th Jan:

    • -Composition: chiaroscuro, focal points, figure/ground relationships
      -Clarification of idea through painting

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    • Session 3: Wednesday 25th Jan:

    • -Translation of painting to 3D – 3D Studio Max crash course
      -Spatial searching and Composition hunting
      -Rendering base plates for painting

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    • Session 4: Wednesday 1st Feb:

    • -Perspective crash course/Designing through perspective
      -Pictorial/Sequential Composition
      -Creating a detailed line drawing

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    • Session 5: Wednesday 15th Feb:

    • -Painting lighting and values, building tone
      -Build-up of atmosphere

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    • Session 6: Wednesday 22nd Feb:

    • -Working up main paintings, overall compositional dynamics
      -Texture/Material/Colour theories

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    • Session 7: Wednesday 2nd Mar:

    • -Working into the details, refining paintings.
      -Painting Marathon
      -Final Submission

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    • Session 8: Wednesday 7th Mar:

    • -Final course submission

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  • Friday 9th Mar:

  • -Department Submission




  • Enrolled Students


  • Felix Brinkhege
    Albane Duvillier
    Neha Dhiren Gandhi
    Sho Ito
    Susan Li
    Roman Lovegrove
    Heon Woo Park
    Vere van Gool
    Xinyue Zhang

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