The Chan Centre for Performing Arts had the most involved drawing process of my UBC Land & Form series images. The parts of the building shown are a circle and an oval in plan. Wanting to capture the curved forms, I had to use more traditional perspective instead of the semi-oblique techniques used in other images. Bing Thom, the architect of the Chan Centre, had his eye on all the details of the building. The alignments between the cladding panels, the fins, mullions, and concrete joints are all dialed in. On an oval in perspective, on a sloping pathway, it was too much to free hand in Illustrator so I modeled the building form in the architecture software, Revit.
Step 1: sketching the composition
It was easy to select the view. The building is nestled down in the landscape, the cascading curves of the building providing a structured rhythm to the many textures and forms of the landscaping. It had to be shown in the evening. I was very interested in working with a blue and orange palette to capture the play between the interior and exterior. I borrowed many of the plants from other drawings to quickly get a sense of how to populate the image.
Step 2: Identifying details
The next step was to identify those medium scale details: the cobbles in the path, the stones in the walls, and the light on the cladding. Somehow the interior would need to be animated but I had no idea what that would look like. None of the other drawings in the series featured people, so they would need to be fairly abstract somehow.
Step 3: Refining color and shapes
The rusty orange wasn’t great. I explored more of a yellow thinking it would complement the purple in the shadows nicely. I also revised the plants, replacing the placeholders with some more reflective of those at the Centre. There was a lot of room to position the plants to get a variety of edges and distribute some darker values throughout the image. I realized there was no way I was going to be able to draft the form of the building or the shingles directly in Illustrator.
Step 4: Importing the modeled building
Look! A shingled oval in perspective! In Revit, I positioned the model to see if from the view I wanted to use. I exported it as a DWG and brought it into Illustrator. Now I had lines to work with. I used live paint to color in the reflective shingles, but the buildings are primarily colored with shapes made with the pen tool sitting behind the linework.
Step 5: Adding Focus
I started thinking about how to use light to shape the image and focus it toward the center.
Step 6: Toning the Light
I finally found a tone of light I was happy with. I used a gradient from orange at the bottom fading into a yellow on top. I think it has a soft, velvety quality that is characteristic of light on misty days. The subtle shift from orange to yellow is complimentary to the blue and purple tones I wanted to shift the exterior in.
Step 7: toning the landscape
Building off the color decisions made in the last step, I removed all the warm, bright greens, shifting them toward blue.
Step 8: Detailing the foreground
With all the compositional and color decisions made, it was time to start drawing the details. The image is framed from the position of someone walking down the sloped path leading to the building entrance. The bushes on the left needed to feel fairly flat while the garden on the right was planted on a severe slope. Being rendered at twilight, the detail is subtle due to the low contrast.
Step 9: More Foreground work
I worked back and forth between the right-hand, the left-hand forest, and the planter in the center. After the structure of the plants were in place, I added a glow of light fluttering over the crests of the bushes and creating some glittery fresnel reflection on the stones due to their craggy surfaces’ oblique angle to the view. The cobbles became more stone like and their geometry refined to reflect the curving and perspective of the path.
Step 10: Detailing the building
I set my focus back on the building, tidying up some of the alignments of the architectural features, the interior, and setting the text of the building sign to the curve of the canopy. I added some subtle texture and sparkle to the concrete and cladding shingles. I gave some depth and body to the ivy.
Step 11: Final details
Finally, I finished drawing the forest, giving a density to the trees. Last but not least, I dangled some ivy over the entrance to soften the form.