Rediscovering the joy of the design sketch

We'll be docking in Galveston in a few hours, and our Caribbean vacation will come to an end. We have the long drive to Austin to decompress. Overall, this cruise has been great. Both the service and food were awesome. No outbreak of COVID-19 that we're aware of. Plus, first time I've been on a cruise that was only 60% full-- which is quite a treat. Kudos to Carnival.

So, I'm working on a new project with Jama Jurabaev and Jerry Perkins.

Jama is a fabulous Hollywood concept artist, and you may have seen some of his Star Wars work on Disney's Mandalorian. He does many of those amazing paintings you see at the end of each episode. He also runs Big, Medium, Small-- ( https://www.bigmediumsmall.com/ ) a studio-production-quality asset and kitbashing venue.

Jerry is also quite the talented concept artist. And he is the driving force behind Boxcutter and Hard Ops. And, I know of no other better 3D modeler on the planet-- and I've seen a few.

So, what *are* we working on? Well it's sci-fi of course, but with a bit of a different spin. More on that soon. Well be designing some elaborate sets, and we did a few warm up exercises to get started-- which is actually the purpose of this post.

With the advent of 3D, I, like many others, have started to concept design directly in 3D, as "in the application." And for the most part, it requires new design workflows and of course with this technique come several restrictions. While I won't get into the lot of them, suffice to say when you have a hammer, all your problems look like nails.

So, I decided on this trip to break out and try some new stuff-- things I haven't done for a bit. As an industrial designer, we're trained to draw to communicate our ideas. And, my drawing has been in hibernation for a few years. I was excited to see how I would fare.

I also brought with me 2 different devices to draw on. Both are e-ink 10.3" tablets: the Remarkable 2 and the BooX Note Air.

So, I started on the Remarkable, and it has a better stylus and a more paper-like feel. Drawing on it required a lot of hand precision, and still resulted in a very rough sketch, with little iteration. This is the UTILITY VEHICLE sketch. Overall, I wasn't all that happy with it. I did another sketch of a HAZARDOUS TRANSPORT GURNEY, and I liked it even less. Turns out, for me the lack of precision and limited drawing tools, made the Remarkable less than-- remarkable.

I then moved on to the Android 10 powered Note Air. I used a Samsung stylus-- as the one that came with it had zero grip. There were lots more pen types and line thicknesses, along with a straight line tool and circles/ellipses.

With straight lines, I could easily set up a perspective grid, so drawing in 3D was much easier. And ellipses are great for wheels (remember minor axis *always* aligns with the object's axis). So, now I could actually *focus* on the design.

My first attempt resulted in the PORTABLE ROBOTIC WORKSTATION, with the second creating the AUTONOMOUS LIFT BOT.

Still, more interesting to me was how sketching affected my design process. With the multiple layers in the Note Air's drawing app, I was able to go back to a familiar design iteration sketch style called "Rapid Viz."

With Rapid Viz, you start sketching loosely, then add a piece of tracing paper, and iterate your design-- over and over-- with more sheets of tracing paper, until you find a design you like.

You then take more tracing paper (in my case layers), and begin to refine your finished iteration, adding and subtracting details, until you have a fairly tight line drawing, without line weights, shading or shadows, or anything that might communicate "sketch." At this point it looks like a technical drawing.

Finally, you add line weight, shading and shadows, then titles and callouts and you're done. For me this process was much more contemplative-- and wonderfully exploration intense, than working on 3D to start of with.

And if you're still with me, after this small novel I've written, I'll share one more thought.

We teach kids all sorts of stuff in school-- mathematic equations they'll never use, dead foreign languages, arcane historical data and names (again, who was the brother of Charlemagne?).

But for some reason, we never teach kids how to communicate by drawing. I'm not talking about being an artist, or rendering portraits. But, just how to use simple lines and shapes and arrows to communicate basic stuff.

Dan Roam had some excellent books and tutorials on the subject of anyone's interested.

His book, THE BACK OF THE NAPKIN, is a good one to start with off you know nothing of drawing and want to learn more.

So, I think it would be great if everyone learned a bit about how to communicate with a dry erase marker, or piece of chalk, or just a pencil. I wonder how society would change?

Affiliate links if you're interested:

THE BACK OF THE NAPKIN
https://amzn.to/2WqGG6k

Rapid Viz
https://amzn.to/3jiya1R