THE PAINTED LOOK

Every so often, I come across situations where I want to loosen up my illustrations and give them a more gestural quality. Growing up, I painted a lot and I have always experimented with ways to carry over the brush stroke into my digital architectural illustrations in an attempt to escape the machine generated look. There are plenty of filters in Photoshop that offer up painted styles but they all look too mechanical and clearly like a Photoshop filter. I prefer to do things manually giving me control with where and how I create the strokes. This also provides an opportunity to make unique and controlled gestures that work with the geometry of the illustration. For example, grass will have different brush strokes compared to trees and bushes. For the above illustration, I only applied the painted look to the landscape to develop a stronger contrast between the built form and the surrounding context. 

The image that I am going to be starting with already is at a good place and I could just stop here. However, there is a lot of detail in the landscape and the painted effect will work to tone it down.

1. The first step oddly enough is applying a Photoshop filter. I do this to "rough up" the original image and prepare it for the smudging that will come later on. Choose  "Filter>Brush Strokes>Angled Strokes".

2. The settings that I used in the angled stroke dialogue box may differ from image to image. My goal with the settings is to avoid aggressive and sharp brush strokes. Instead, I am trying to remove some of the detail and blur the edges of the geometry in the illustration.

3. Next, choose the "Smudge Tool" in the left tool bar. The settings are crucial here. Set the "strength" of the smudge tool to around 90%. Then select the drop down menu next to "Brush" and choose the "spatter" brush or something similar to the one chosen below with a diameter set to 45. This brush should come standard with all CS versions. 

4. With the correct settings in place, begin smudging the image. Use short strokes in all directions. Think about how the image would be painted and use gestures accordingly. 

The final result is a illustration with a lot of depth and character that is hard to get with computer generated renderings. It's not a technique that I use often, but one that I have a lot of fun experimenting with and one that steals a lot of attention.

Comments

[ore]

the level of awesomeness of your blog is too damn high!!!!

[Alex Hogrefe]

Haha, thanks Ore

[Jim]

hey alex, i really like the style of your render/drawings. is that possile if you can show us how did you render this building from your drawings? i like the tones, the colours. or may be you can just tell me in text.

And your webiste is very very helful for me, and realize how powerful sketch up is!!.
and also i wanna know, have you try vray in sketch before?
i use to do the render in rhino via vray..it will be great if you can give me some sugesstion.
i am a third years architecural students from australia.
thank you!!

[Marco]

Great Work for all people. Young and old, everyone can learn something from your blog. Thanks a lot.

[Alfonso]

Great render, make a tutorial about the grass, it's amazing how you manage to workout the landscape.

[mostafa]

hi mr alex .

i love your presentation TUTORIALS .

please let me to translate your tutorials to Persian and put them in my blog with Resource Links for Iranian peoples.

i am mostafa an Iranian Architecture Student ...

[architectural rendering]

The detail is great but what i liked most is the whole idea behind the building. The way that you see the green grass combining with the white structure and in the middle the brown color of the wooden base of the house is simply brilliant. Excellent job mate.

[Paul]

Very nice work Alex. Not only are the techniques awesome in the truest sense of the word, the designs are great too and the rendering techniques seem to match the designs seamlessly. I teach the software and can model pretty much anything given enough time and plugins but my appetite for rendering has waned due to lack of interest. I think you might have just spurred me on to break out photoshop and get inspired.

Thanks for these, they are excellent.
regards
Paul

[RED]

im more than glad to find this blog before i start my portfolio work... thank you soo much!!

[Tasnim]

hey alex.. thanks a lot for sharing ur knowledge and skills with us. It helped me a lot. Third year architecture
student from Bangladesh.

[Simone']

Thank you so very much, your tutorials changed my life, seriously.