Preliminary

or drafting is not my thing.

from the skethcbook

I love architecture of all kinds especially Baroque and the more organic work of my current muse Antoni Guadi. Rocco had its place. Traditional Greek design and the gothic megaworks of Europe boggle my mind. The scope of those projects....

And then I remember all the math and drawing involved before a sculptor ever gets a chisel to marble or an iron smith gets to crafting the mould. And it is the drawing that gets me every time. Rather the draftwork involved.

There are special considerations for vertices and arches. How do you support a dome without taking up all the interior space? How do you make a straight line intersect with a curves and not have the building fall down.

I am, perhaps, being too hard on myself since these things are never going to be real buildings that anyone could walk into. Nor are they going to be "real" buildings to the wee creatures I imagine would carve their own Halloween house with tooth and nail. And that really is where the idea for these came from. Imagining a pumpkin field as a city for mice, shrews and the other things we don't want living in our houses. They are fantasy.

And I think that my type A persona should leave well enough alone. Except that I can see my iron peacock over the front door is off center. And the peacock vane on top isn't really sitting on the ball for the domw too well. A cat goes stomping through that neighborhood and there goes the weather vane!  I've already started editing this on paper. As with the last one; a photograph gets you some good distance so you can evaluate how solid your drawing is.

It is essential to do this no matter what you are working on. But in this instance, because I may turn these into rubber stamps, it is more important than color. My fingers are so twitchy to get a brush in hand that I feel I really want to skip over the edits and improvements. If I do that it won't really be my best work. And that will make me feel worse than the compulsion to get the drafting right and the frustration that I am not as much a draftsman as a person who appreciates fine lines.