Art 101 with Sketchup

LA_RR_Architect

When I first started working in Sketchup, one of the things that caught my eye was the quality of surface and light in the images it produced. These images seemed quite reminiscent of the works of Edward Hopper (who’s work I’ve always admired). I wondered how close SU could come to duplicating the look of Hopper’s work and set as one of my many largely unrealized goals to explore the connection when I got a moment.

The moment didn’t come until late last year when I found myself with some unexpected down time to fill. Casting about I found a book on Hopper’s art and in it a series of water colors of the light house at “Two Lights”. I don’t know why the name, I only see one light.

What follows are four small copies of Hopper paintings captured off a variety of internet sites and four images extracted from my SU model. I built the model over a couple days (only one model), paging from one painting to another to try to establish sizes and relationships. The model is pretty simple and clearly far from perfect. On the other hand, I suspect that the paintings, subject to the whims of the artist’s eye, are also not a perfect guide to the model maker.

In the end, it was a fun little project which I believe shows that SU does in fact have some utility as a tool for exploring the artist’s vision.

1 - 2 lights.jpg
Light house 1.jpg
2 - 2 lights.jpg
Light house 2.jpg
3 - 2 lights.jpg
Light house 3.jpg
4 - 2 lights.jpg
Light house 4.jpg