House Portraits: The Realtors Secret Weapon for Closing Deals and Creating Happy Referrals For Life

Everyone knows that house portraits in watercolor, pen and ink or pencil make striking and memorable gifts. Think of the people you know who have either commissioned or received house portraits. Chances are they hold pride of place in their picture galleries, and they've probably been inspired to print them on holiday cards and stationery as well.

House Portrait of Guest House, Easthampton, NY (w/ Clark Smith)

What is less well known is that house portraits in watercolor, pen and ink or pencil have measurable value when it comes to selling your home. They capture your home in its best light, grabbing attention over the repetitive photographs that fill the storefront window at the realtor's office, or blur together in the the real estate section of the paper. 

Vignette: Main House, Easthampton, NY (w/ Clark Smith)

The modest cost of a high quality house portrait--or its cousins: the architectural rendering of an apartment, or the interactive 3-d model of a NYC loft built in Sketchup--is a drop in the bucket compared to the

How House Portraits Help Sell The World's Most Beloved Listings (i.e. yours!)

Using a house portrait (or architectural rendering of your building) instead of a photograph for your real estate listing can make the difference between capturing a qualified buyer's interest in the heat of the moment, and disappearing into the background noise of everyday real estate advertising.


Next time you walk by the storefront of a real estate office, look at what's going on. Prospective buyers, shy about going inside and committing to a relationship with a stranger, can be seen...

How To Create A Kickstarter Video To Explain Your Startup

Kickstarter is all the rage, but don't bother to apply for crowdfunding on the site until you have created a video that explains your idea in a brief engaging way. How do you do that? Well, I recently found at least one satisfying answer to that question in the form of a video made by my favorite illustrator (and frequent contributor to the New York Times), Christoph Niemann. As the story goes, Niemann was in his car en route to picking up his young daughter at a party when he randomly caught the last few minutes of a Terry Gross interview with Maurice Sendak (click link below). He was so moved by the segment that he went home and...

 

It delivers a world of infinite convenience and selection to our fingertips...

 

 

My Friend Tom Is Cool

My friend Tom Schaller is cool. Back in the 1980s, he just about single-handedly brought back the tradition of architectural watercolor rendering (it had long-since been replaced by pen-and-ink) when he wrote a book called Architectural Rendering in Watercolor. Along with Steve Oles' books, they were mandatory reading for any aspiring architectural illustrator at the time, and for a lot of architects, too.

I remember going to the bookstore at the Helmsley House on Madison Ave. to get my copy in 1990. Clark and I used to keep it open on our desks when we were working together like I told you. Tom sort of blew everyone's mind because he did these images for himself and for his books, with no client involved. Did you ever have friends like that? That's when you know a true artist. So there we are trying to figure out how this guy does these amazing architectural renderings in watercolor and these amazing watercolor techniques, and just when you think you may have figured out one of his moves, like underpainting, which sounds like "underpanting" but isn't, which Tom, because he is actually a pretty wild and crazy guy would probably laugh at if you did it to somebody, he...

A Great Book To Read For People Who Love Understanding The Underlying Structure of Things, Including Designers, Architects and Architectural Renderers

If you like learning about the underlying structures that shape the physical, economic and political landscape of our country since day one, then I have a book for you: Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 by John Stilgoe. As alluded to in an earlier post, the book provides timeless insight into the collisions of culture that continue to shape the contemporary American experience, right up to yesterday's 2013 Presidential Inauguration Ceremony, and, I dare say, the most recent TV or newspaper story you watched or read today.

John Stilgoe's Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845, is a classic book and required reading of all first year students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

John Stilgoe's Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845, is a classic book and required reading of all first year students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. I've got an architectural watercolor rendering to do today (Yay!) so I'll keep my part of this post short, but check out the excerpt below from the chapter on the history of schoolhouses on the subject of a book written by Jedidiah Morse in 1789 called The American Geography.The book was an off-the-charts bestseller which coincided with the growing movement, eventually mandated by the "tyrannical" federal government, to educate all American children in communal schoolhouses, almost always one-room affairs which have a fascinating history relative to where they were built (usually the most central place, or on a piece of waste land donated by a farmer, but almost invariably in the most difficult-to-get-to and foreboding locations within each school district). Due to its fortuitous timing, the book had perhaps a disproportionate influence on the opinions of generations of young Americans, and is even given credit for much of the misinformation which started the California Gold Rush of 1849. As Stilgoe sets it up: "Topographical knowledge no longer only derived from topographical experience: Morse filled his books with maps, charts and lengthy prose descriptions of states, regions, rivers, territories, forests, soils and agricultural and mineral riches...Morse emphasized that his information was scientific and reliable, and schoolmasters commanded students to memorize it. Scholars learned that New Hampshire was filled with mountains and cascades, that North Carolina "abounds with medicinal plants and roots"...and that the Spanish Dominions truly needed American improvement." Now here's where it gets crazy (and racist)...

The Thing I Don't Get About The People Who Hate Clinton and/or Obama

One of the things that has always confused this architectural renderer is that the same people who hate Clinton and Obama tend to also be the same people who praise the virtues of hard work and independence. So which kind of a president would you rather have running things: the "hard working" George W Bush, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, ex-party boy and Yale frat boy class comedian who cynically "found" born-again Jesus to get more votes; or Bill Clinton, the son of a hairdresser who bootstrapped himself into Yale (and Oxford and Georgetown) by his own wits? Then there's Barack Obama, the black son of a single mom and Kenyan dad who got himself into Harvard. I mean, do conservatives who praise these traits of character see the disconnect?

Reflection in a puddle in the parking lot of Haven Restaurant in Lenox, MA. Did you figure out it's upside down?

Of course, it's not really about that, is it? It's not about preferring to have the guy in there who will be more thoughtful about the decisions he makes, from starting wars to repairing the nation's infrastructure to providing opportunity to the maximum number of people who, by no fault of their own get dealt dramatically different hands at birth. It's about conveniently forgetting the...

A New Party Game

Here's an idea for a new game. If you're ever at a party and there's a lull in the action, pull out your smartphones and play "The Auto-complete Game." Here are the directions:

  1. Launch the browser on your smartphone
  2. type in a short phrase that contains one of the following words: who, what, when, where or how, as in "who played..." and then just end the phrase there (you don't have to add the ellipses)
  3. Look at the list of suggested answers that Google provides as a function of their "auto-completion" feature (note: the suggestions provided are based on Google's analysis of the most recent and most popular search queries in the world beginning with the phrase you entered)
  4. Ask the other party guests to...

     

     

How To Use Key Words To Attract Attention To Your Website

Keywords are the terms that people use when trying to find what they are looking for on the internet. This site is a Squarespace site, and one of the features Squarespace provides, along with ready-made templates and hosting and comprehensive analysis of your traffic, is a list of the keywords that people use to find your site. As a rule, these words tend to be a surprise, never quite aligning with the terms you, as site creator, thought people would use when you first tried to guess them.

 

A Proposed New Headquarters for LLadro Porcelain, Jay Valgora, Studio V, Architect

As of this morning, the keywords people used over the last week to find this site, whether they were looking for something like it or something else, were, in order of use:

  1. architectural rendering
  2. watercolor techniques
  3. architectural renderings
  4. architectural rendering techniques
  5. watercolor rendering techniques
  6. pen and ink techniques
  7. watercolor rendering
  8. watercolor techniques
  9. architectural sketches
  10. watercolor rendering techniques
  11. watercolor techniques
  12. architectural watercolor rendering techniques
  13. pen techniques
  14. different watercolor techniques in rendering
  15. architectural sketching
  16. pen and ink
  17. sketching techniques
  18. architectural rendering in watercolor
  19. rendering watercolor

You get the idea. Actually that's not too bad. A few weeks ago one of the terms was "movable hot tub," so this week's visitors are a little more focused.

I don't pretent to understand how the search engine crawlers that comb the internet every night make a distinction between authentic use of keywords (aka "white hat" search engine optimization or SEO), and the so-called "black hat" use of keywords (such as I am ironically attempting to practice here) but somehow they do, and part of that has to do with pictures (and captions, believe it or not) that relate to the keywords, so I'll attach some of those now and just say goodbye until next time, and thanks for reading this.

This was an architectural rendering in watercolor done for a really nice architect named David at MR Architecture in NYC.

This was an architectural sketch in watercolor done for a speculative real estate project in Alford, MAThis is an architectural rendering in watercolor of a section of a library (to which Shepley Bullfinch Architects in Boston, MA were making an addition to) at Lehigh UniversityThis is an architectural rendering in watercolor of a concert hall for the New Hampshire Music Festival based in Concord, NH by a really nice architect who's name escapes me, but he was a great guy, as were the clients at NHMF!

Instagram Meets Etsy: A New Way To Support Local Business

A couple of years ago, in 2008, when the financial crisis hit, there was no work in what I do. It just dried up. Actually it didn't just dry up, but at the NYC firm where I did most of my architectural rendering and storyboarding there was only enough work for two people that did what I do and maybe three and I was the fourth guy who lived far away in the Berkshires and who was, if I'm not being too paranoid, just more difficult to work with than the two guys that lived right there in Brooklyn and didn't have families and worked harder than I did and were more talented than I was (no, seriously) so my work just dried up. That's when my wife and I decided we should do something to take our minds off the crisis and do something positive for the world, or at least stay busy like artists do.

The internet changed the way we shop.

So we came up with this idea to use technology to help local business, which were actually our neighbors in a way but also the people who took the chance to run an independent business which actually made the town nicer to live in and paid taxes and hired local people, so you can see that despite the usual complaint that most people would say that local businesses charge too much, they actually probably don't, considering that they provide instant gratification and service and keep Main Street alive and keep your town vital which probably helps with real estate values.

It delivered a world of infinite convenience and selection to our fingertips,

It's all just tied up in knots of complexity which are never as simple as it seems. But of course online shopping really messes all that up, and I wouldn't blame you if you were already mad at me, because it's hard to tell someone that they should support local brick and mortar business when they can just say "No, Amazon is so much cheaper and it's too hard to think about that all those other things you say about supporting taxes and school plays and besides, the last school play wasn't that good anyway," (although as an aside I was always amazed when we lived in Summit, NJ and even now living up here in Great Barrington which is the Berkshires how good your average high school play or musical has become, most likely because MTV or something has empowered every generation since after people my age that singing and even dancing but mostly being on stage was not showing off but was self esteem that you should do).

but it didn’t deliver the whole world. In fact, there is a world of remarkable products and services that still remains invisible to online shoppers:

So we thought about the problem and one of the things we came up with was that local business loses a lot of business for the really simple fact that everybody always shops online these days and gets their stuff that way, and there's a lot to be said for that except for the bad things I suggested above, and but the stuff that local business sells right downtown doesn't even appear online, meaning that even though their phone numbers and addresses do and maybe a few photos, that photos of the actual every little things they sell don't appear as fast or in good pictures as the stuff that we buy online from the comfort of our own living rooms on Amazon and in our kitchens. So of course you're not going to buy it locally if you can't even see it online and you're actually shopping at Amazon, or just windowshopping online to know who else has it like Target if you don't like Amazon, because it's not there and its shop keepers who are like us and not like corporations can't afford it to be there, or if you were like our friend Lauralee Epstein who hates to buy her grandkids stuff from online when she could buy it locally here and support Great Barrington, but she just doesn't know what they want in NYC, when all the stores she likes are here and she doesn't have a wishlist, which there is no reason why we couldn't do and you'll see that in a second.

Main Street! That’s right, despite all our advances in technology, online shoppers still can’t see most of what’s for sale in the brick and mortar stores around them,

In fact you're probably not even going to think about getting what you want to buy online locally because it's like two different worlds--the new world where you buy stuff online that's in your house and you can do fast, and the old fashioned world where you have to go downtown and buy it if you can even find it or if you have the time to go into a lot of stores first but risk getting frustrated that it's taking so long, although not everyone feels that way but I know I do, which is why I'm still wearing a lot of stuff I've had for years unless someone buys me something which I rarely do for myself.

so even online shoppers who would love to support local default to Amazon, Target and the online retail giants that steal downtown shoppersSo even if you wanted to support local business which a lot of people do, you probably are beginning to do it less and less, and especially our kids aren't going to do it anymore unless we come up with something really clever that tricks them into doing it or makes it more fun like Instagram or Angry Birds, and if that still does good for the world like local food that's even better. Otherwise we're not going to have any downtowns left! Or every downtown will look like really built up places or like the suburbs near Denver where CVS and Revco are on every corner and there are no more really cool little stores, just Starbucks chains, which I seriously hope you aren't thinking to yourself that that wouldn't be so bad given everything i've just been talking about? Because if everything is chains, then the money that they make goes back to the state where they have their corporate headquarters and doesn't stay in the local economy to help schools or anything which has a lot of bad things about it if you follow links to places that research it and talk about it.

and put the continued existence of local independent shopping at risk.

Or at least they did until now. Introducing Main and Me,

So even if you wanted to, you just can't see what's for sale downtown because no or almost no independent shop keepers has the money or time to put photos and descriptions for search engines of all their stuff online especially when they have families and kids that need to do homework and have dinner. But what if they had help from accidentally everybody who liked to do all this photo sharing stuff people do now or add stuff to wishlists they selfishly made for themselves, at least at first, or also everybody who supports local shopping or the idea of it as long as there was no skin off their back, or if it was fun like a game? The shop keepers could still do it on their own using this idea if they didn't want people taking pictures in their store, but what if the ones who were still old and cranky and didn't want to change and put photos of their stuff online but were not helping the big picture of getting your whole town online, what if it was fun to help them and they accepted it, or at least the next generation of shop keepers just said, Oh yeh, of course that makes sense like Yelp did or Facebook did to our parents and now look at how everyone uses those? And besides they're not any more technical than you and I and they hate having passwords they forget so even if they could be online it probably wouldn't last very long because they would just have stuff to do like us and forget their passwords and then just say "Forget this, I'm going to run my store the old fashioned way and just have people come in and buy stuff and be nice to them so they always come back next Thanksgiving when they're up here again and don't necessarily want to hang out with their brother-in-law who likes George Bush on Thursday morning, or the day before and after Thanksgiving if they're staying for a couple of days.

the free-to-use mobile and web app that makes it as simple as “snap...

So, in a nutshell, local stores are definitely not in the 20th century yet. They're still doing so much the old way and in the meantime Amazon is taking away their business because Amazon and Walmart are always doing stuff the newest way and that's the way a whole new generation of digital natives is learning to do stuff, too, like our kids if you're older, and Foursquare and Yelp and Instagram like I said, but not Facebook so much because that is really getting creepy the way Mark Zuckerberg is never asking for permission to show stuff about you to advertisers, so the future is in trouble, too, which is why you hear a lot of otherwise well-meaning kids who like gay marriage and other things that are good for Democrats still shopping at Amazon even though they don't know yet that that's politically uncool, or hopefully will become really uncool like wearing fur and sugar or spending too much time on Facebook pretty soon, and buying locally has this really practical message like local food that says "Hey, this isn't just kidding around or something online, this is actual," or it could be if we get this message out.

caption...

So that's when we got the idea to make it as easy as snapping, captioning and checking in a photo to start an online store for yourself if you didn't have one with as many photos as you wanted and hopefully even every single thing you sell, because why not, you could just ask that high school kid that works for you to use their smartphone to do it if they were just going to be doing their homework anyway in the afternoons, and then take all the stores in the same town that started their own page and automatically put them also into a page for your whole town, so that you could either shop store by store or windowshop the whole town all at once like if you were going to Cape Cod that weekend and you wanted to see what was the cool stuff for sale in their stores before you got there, or any place else since we would want the whole country to do this to revolutionize local shopping and make it just as powerful as Amazon. Btw, did I mention we wouldn't let Amazon on? or other national brands since they already have the resources and this would just be for local shopping since that's the world of shopping and the stores that helps our actual places where we live.

and “check in”...

So we thought, let's do this! Let's use something fun that everybody does anyway to do this not-so-accidental really positive thing of also putting everything for sale at local brick and mortar stores of every town online to help out local stores--which is why we call it "Main and Me" instead of something like "Me and Me" which would be all about Me like everything seems to be these days--so that whenever people start shopping online, the stuff that's for sale locally shows up just as first as Amazon. So that's how Main and Me was born, which is hoping to someday tap into the energy like the local food movement where people say you should eat locally because my friend grew the lettuce and it cost less gas to get it here, so the same way you can shop locally and make your town healthy, even though there are a lot of detractors in this world, too, that say the price will always be too high, or that it doesn't always save gas to not use overnight delivery or UPS, or like my one friend who says even buying stuff is bad because we don't need more stuff and if you do you should buy used stuff that's just as good as new on eBay, and she does.

(to be continued)

for resource-challenged merchants and downtown directors to begin putting Main Street online in a day.

How To Weigh 200 Pounds (A New Way to Exercise)

But the thing is you always have this nagging idea that you aren't getting enough exercise because your pants are still getting tighter and also because you look things up on the internet, like how many calories is there in a glass of wine, or should I drink beer or scotch tonight instead. (The answer, disturbingly, is about 300) And how many glasses of wine are in a bottle (the answer is, there are supposed to be four. If you to a restaurant with four people and watch the waiter pour if you don't believe me you'll see that that's what they get taught) because I hope there's a lot of glasses supposed to be in a bottle because it seems like I just had two big ones and it hasn't even gotten to the rachel Maddow show yet and I'm down to about a third of that bottle left

My Friend Clark Is Cool (Warning: this is a long post)

My friend Clark Smith is cool. Just look at his amazing watercolors below and tell me he's not. I call him my friend, which he is, but if you landed here from Mars right now, you would say "Why is he your friend? You haven't seen him in 5 years?" And I would have to say, well, true enough, but it seems like we just had lunch yesterday, and I don't think guys hold it against each other if their friendships lapse for, like, ten years at a time. They just pick it up again like everything was normal. Otherwise we'd have to gaze into the existential abyss and wrestle with some sort of deep feelings, and I like to leave deep things like that to the guy that makes the Hobbit movies.

traditional architectural rendering, digital rendering, architectural illustration and architectural sketching

Ok, let's start there. Clark likes tuna fish, just like I do. He used to eat it every day for lunch, just like I did. That way you don't have to make any decisions; you're just like, "Hi, can I have tuna on a roll with lettuce tomato and muenster cheese, please?" and the guy doesn't even say anything but just starts making it, and I think the deli guys actually secretly appreciate that. That way they don't have to think either.

OMG I Just Read A Book!

On New Year's Eve this year I started getting sick. I had a party to attend that evening, but I had to fake being "into it" and just try to survive until midnight so as to publicly and visibly fulfill my obligation to "be happy" about it becoming 2013 and go home.

Architectural sketch (or architectural rendering, if you will) of an imaginary wedding chapel

The next morning I was so sick I couldn't handle looking at my laptop, and that's saying something for me. (In fact, I have been more or less addicted for years to a daily routine of checking email, reading RSS feeds, and re-checking email ad infinitum, all meant to convince me that, by the end of the day, I have done something important.)

On top of that, I have entered a phase of life where a number of problems have begun to weigh deeply on my conscience, many of them work- and future-related, so I have begun looking for modes of thought or physical routines which deliver an hour or two of psychic peace on those days that I am not happily distracted by the work of producing traditional architectural renderings and storyboards.

Architectural sketch (or architectural rendering, if you will) of a floating tea light ceremony

In that context, it occured to me to browse the books gathering dust on my shelves and pick one out to read. I had a vague recollection of "reading" in the the pre-internet era, I was sure I could learn to do it again. I settled on a new-ish book: The Rest is Noise, by Alex Ross, and off I went, reading. Once I got through that initial block of reading entire pages at a time before realizing I hadn't retained the meaning of a single word, I found that I was reading multiple pages at a time without falling asleep! I hadn't felt promise like this in years.

Architectural sketch (or architectural rendering, if you will) of a Lion King-type super-scaled puppet show featuring the Hawaiian goddess Pelle

I caught more of a thrill the next day when I picked up the same book and realized that I had made it a quarter of the way through! Not only that, but I had learned quite a bit about Strauss, Wagner, Mahler, and the reactionary revolution in atonal music they inspired (more on this in future posts). All this simply because I was reading during the day. This reading thing was working out well.

Architectural sketch (or architectural rendering, if you will) of a solar-cooled resort chair or beach chair

That was back on January 2nd. Today is January 15th and I can proudly announce to you that I have completed three paper books this year (about three times my 2012 output!): The Rest Is Noise, A War To End All War, and Black Child, by Richard Wright. (Remember, these were books used to keep dust off my shelves, not necessarily today's most happening reads.)

Architectural sketch (or architectural rendering, if you will) of an imaginary chamber for star-gazing

Most exciting of all, I have just started re-reading John Stilgoe's epic book (and companion to his required Harvard GSD class) about The Common American Landscape, 1525 to 1860. It looks like it's going to be as awesome as I remember it. I knocked off forty pages this morning, and I may try to sneal in another ten at lunch. Who knew there was such a thing as the Missouri Territory Earthquake of 1812?

Well, just wanted you internet denizens to know that it is possible to learn paper book reading again, that I'm loving it, that I'm learning, and that it's begun reducing the amount of time I waste on the internet everyday--or at least replacing a good portion of that time with production, rather than consumption, of silly blog posts.

Almost forgot: hope you've enjoyed the storyboards I did for a famous NYC architect some years ago for a top-secret Disney Cruise Line project, converting a private island into a resort masquerading as the home of the mythical Hawaiian goddess Pelle. Cool, huh?

And for all of you search engine crawlers scratching your algorithms, wondering what a poorly-written post  about reading a book has to do with traditional architectural rendering, digital rendering, architectural illustration and architectural sketching, I don't know but it was fun.

How Funny Were The Golden Globes Last Night?

Did you catch the Golden Globes last night? Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were brilliant. I don't know why I get embarrassed hearing Hollywood stars getting lampooned in real time. I mean, they've got money, they've got egos, why do I care if they are uncomfortably humiliated in public? Of course it's the ones who retain their composure under fire that draw one's admiration. Maybe that's why they trot themselves out for the ceremony; to say to 25 million viewers, "see, we can handle being made fun of!"

Still, that one guy, Christian something or other, winning for Django? I mean, yeh, he was awesome in Inglorious Basterds--spine-tingling, jaw-dropping awesome--but best-supporting actor? I don't know.

Of course, Daniel Day Lewis for Lincoln was perfect. Have you seen it yet? Did you read Doris Kearns Goodwin's book that inspired it? If you haven't, drop everything and do so.

Well, that's it for today's post. Hope you like the rendering I did (below) for David Rockwell's 2010 Oscar's set. I also threw in a project we did for the magician David Copperfield about twenty years ago. When you get right down to it, it's pretty fun working with David. Any predictions for the Oscar's? [Wow, it's liberating writing a blog when you can be confident no one is reading it! :)]

Oh...almost forgot...for all of you search engine spiders and crawlers trying to figure out what this page is about (fellow human beings, please stop reading here and get back to your regularly scheduled lives): let me just add that the artists and architects who practice watercolor techniques, architectural rendering, architectural watercolor rendering, architectural sketching, watercolor rendering techniques, architectural sketches, watercolor techniques, architectural rendering or any of the other disciplines associated with traditional architectural rendering are few and far between. But fear not: some of us are still here, and we're a lot of fun to work with. Have a great Monday, my friends.

How To Find An Architectural Renderer

These days it is no easy task to find an independent architectural renderer. With every architectural graduate student now capable of creating digital architectural renderings, the registered architects who practice watercolor techniques, architectural rendering, architectural watercolor rendering, architectural sketching, watercolor rendering techniques, architectural sketches, watercolor techniques, architectural rendering or any of the other disciplines associated with traditional architectural rendering are becoming harder to find.

 My name is James Akers, I am a licensed architect and I specialize in watercolor techniques, architectural rendering, architectural watercolor rendering, architectural sketching, watercolor rendering techniques, architectural sketches, watercolor techniques, architectural rendering and all of the other disciplines associated with traditional architectural rendering. Email me at jakers3 at gmail dot com, or call me at four-one-three 250-8800 to discuss what you need, and how to provide it in the quickest, most affordable way possible. Thanks.

 

 

Use Traditional Architectural Rendering By Hand To Present Your Concept Designs in Human Terms

There is no better way to differentiate your architecture firm or product design firm from your competition than to use traditional architectural rendering by hand--including pencil sketches, pen and ink sketches and watercolor sketches--to connect your client'e emotions with your conceptual design. Digital architectural rendering has its place and no architectural or product design presentation can be complete without it, but if everyone is showing the same digital architectural rendering, than it will be the designer that uses traditional architectural rendering to connect her clients' emotions to her ideas that will cut through the noise of what everyone else is doing and make the sale.

James Akers deploys traditional architectural rendering techniques to help sell his clients' conceptual architectural designs to their world famous clients, whether those clients specialize in sports design, hospitality design, entertainment design or institutional design.

 

Architectural Renderings and Storyboards for Proposed Theme Park

Pen and ink sketches are less expensive than traditional watercolor renderings, but they bring energy and human touch to the presentation of conceptual architectural designs. Nothing differentiates your firm from your competitors more than the idea that you still "sketch on the back of a napkin."

The following sketches for an imaginary theme park were commissioned by one of the world's most famous and enduring sports franchises. (With gratitude to Charles Rush for his excellent work adding Photoshop color to these sketches.)

 

 

 

 

Appendix: Here are some keywords which will help readers index this article:

  1. architectural rendering
  2. watercolor techniques
  3. architectural renderings
  4. architectural rendering techniques
  5. watercolor rendering techniques
  6. pen and ink techniques
  7. watercolor rendering
  8. watercolor techniques
  9. architectural sketches
  10. watercolor rendering techniques
  11. watercolor techniques
  12. architectural watercolor rendering techniques
  13. pen techniques
  14. different watercolor techniques in rendering
  15. architectural sketching
  16. pen and ink
  17. sketching techniques
  18. architectural rendering in watercolor
  19. rendering watercolor

Sketches and Storyboards for Product & Architectural Concept Design

When it comes to explaining your product and architectural concept designs, there is no better storytelling medium than pencil, pen and paper. Pen and ink sketches lend a human touch missing in most presentations, and help differentiate your firm from the nameless competition all using the same digital techniques. Th

If You Are An Unemployed Architect, Don't Start Over, Start Up: Google Reader As A Research Tool

Google Reader is the best research tool I've found. "Regular" Google searches result in reams of pages that--more and more--seem biased by spamming and commercial interests, requiring hours of tedious DSL-speed page opening and closing to sort through. Reader, on the other hand, allows you to focus your search by first identifying the authoritative voices blogging on subjects relevant to your start up idea, then aggregating feeds from those blogs into a personal, automatically assembled and self-renewing stream of information which you scroll through in your Reader window. My research became 500%-1,000% more efficient the day I dscovered Reader. Of course Reader was only meaningful because of first discovering who I should be following, and I did that via the various podcasts I was listening to as described in my last post.

The basics are as follows:

  1. go to the Reader link at top of your gmail page (and if you don't use gmail, please start). 
  2. type in the name of a blog or author if you have one, pull up their "feed" and subscribe, or
  3. type in a subject of interest, wander through the amazing list of results Google supplies, and subscribe to those of interest

Reader adds the blog to the column on the left of your new Reader page, and later allows you to organize your blogs by subject folder. When you highlight a single blog or folder, only the contents of that stream appear in the Reader field, allowing you to scroll through the information from all--or just related--blogs in a single rolling feed. This allows you to go right to your most-read daily items ("The Daily Dish" & "Mashable" for me) as often (or in my case, compulsively) as you want, and save work-related research for work times. The efficiency and time savings from NOT having to bounce around between different blog sites in your browser is reason alone to adopt Reader, but Reader goes way beyond that.

For example, you can subscribe to all the blogs that a list of noted authorities and/or celebrities subscribe to. (Seriously, it's very cool.) Or you can browse blogs by subject matter as pre-organized by Google. And Reader lets you store articles of interest in a number of ways, including posting them to your own blog with a single click (btw, Google's free blog tool is called Blogger and that's worth a chapter, though my current favorite is Posterous.com) starring them, sharing them as part of your own RSS feed, or emailing them, and you can do all of that from within the stream (vs. taking all the time to open up the original source page then doing it). Just go and get lost in it for an hour or two and you'll quickly appreciate the efficiencies it brings, not to mention the amazing new factoid you discovered about QR codes or Paypal making mobile payment form your cellphone possible.

But the real reason to use Reader if you're an unemployed architect starting up is that for those fields related to your start up and about which you have to know as much as possible, there is no more efficient way to explore, absorb, document and organize the information. Give it a try. And then please thank me in the comments below so I know you're all reading this:)

When Is A Cord Of Firewood A Cord Of Firewood?

 

It's a common pain point among homeowners: When you buy firewood, how do you know if the pile of wood they dump in your driveway is actually a cord or not--as in 8' wide x 4' high x 4' deep after being stacked? I mean, that's a lot of wood, and the pile never seems to meet the legal definition once you stack it. All of which is not even to ask whether the logs are 18" or 24" long (2 x 24" = required 4'. Great. But 2 x 18"? That missing 12" of depth represents 25% of the volume of a cord). Well, wood buyers take heart from the following email exchange with my friend, a philosopher-developer-sculptor and all-around great guy who doesn't really need the money and sells firewood more or less out of the goodness of his heart.

On Nov 4, 2010, at 11:53 AM, James Akers wrote:

Now don't get mad!! You wouldn't respect me unless I pointed out the following.

Here is the math you asked for so you could double check your cord estimating technique:

  • volume of 1 cord of wood stacked = 8' w x 4' dp x 4" high = 128 cu ft.

  • volume of 2 cords stacked = 128 cu ft x 2 = 256 cu ft

  • volume of my pre-existing 2009 remnant firewood pile: 2' high x 8' long x 2' deep = 32 cu ft

  • volume of 2010 stack (see photo, previous email) after 2 cords wood delivered and stacked over pre-existing pile = 10.5' w. x 4' dp x 6' h. = 252 cu ft

  • actual volume of the 2 "cords" you delivered = 252 - 32 = 220 cu ft

  • missing volume of wood purchased from best friend (you) = 36 cu ft = 8' x 2' dp x 2' high

I can come get it if it makes it easier? Or you can never talk to me again, your choice. But I would miss that:)

On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 7:59 PM, (best friend) wrote:

I hope that your asshole is not as tight as you had to stack that wood (I looked) to "prove" the math. We can form the missing portion in suppository form (on a lathe) if that would be to your liking.

Actually, and all kidding aside, I am glad to have a lunatic actually check the formula. The kid that told me that 187 cubic feet loose was 128 cubic feet stacked--as published in the State of Maine Forestry something or other. The question, of course, is what does that actually mean? I loaded the truck to the "top" of the 24" tailgate (thus 2'X8"X12' or 192 cubic feet) with a little bit sticking up and some voids below--loose. The second load appeared a bit light but I had wondered if the first was a little heavy. Averaged out we are 12.5% shy on two cords. I will drop it off.

The thing I have puzzled over for years is why people are so anxious about getting ripped off on firewood. Its the corollary question to why people go to Taft Farms and peel their corn on site because there may be a bug and a dozen ears is four bucks. Firewood processing is basically public service and yet few of us hold all the other thieves to account i.e. the billable hours from the $250 an hour lawyer, the $20,000 a year health insurance bill and so on. Maybe it is because it is something you can see and count and we have so little control everywhere else. I was the same way whenever I bought wood.

Yer buddy

Me to my friend:

Very nice (and funny) reply. Glad you're still my friend after me being such an asshole. I think its a version of what you say: no one wants to spend $200 on a cord of firewood when the same could go toward food or fashion, so we cling to the commonly accepted definition of "a cord" to reduce the pain, always suspecting we haven't actually received a cord (since they know we'll never check--or have the guts to call them on it). A cord, goes the thinking, is still supposed to be a cord, thank God...unlike a 2x4. Of course a cord is also supposed to be 4' deep when stacked, begging the logical question: "should the 18" logs you left be 24" long so that, stacked in two parallel rows, they create a 4' deep stack, or is the 12" of air between two rows of 18" logs also meant to be overlooked by naive consumers?"

Anyway, many thanks for your honest and auspicious reply, and my condolences for your voluntary involvement in a thankless retail operation where performance is so easy to measure. Yer bud.