This post is part of our summer 2018 blOAAg series, Summer Sketches: Capturing the Essence of Architectural Ideas. 

Sketching can be a wonderful way to dream and play at the very outset of a project, before anything has yet been pulled from the air. I enjoy watercolour paint as a medium because of its inherent luminous qualities. Sketching with watercolour allows one to enter into an intuitively constructed world of unconstrained relationships and pure atmosphere. This particular sketch attempts to conjure ideas about light, enclosure, and threshold, within a wilderness setting, for a rustic shelter in northern Ontario. Vague formal qualities begin to emerge, alongside key relationships with the landscape beyond. The various components all share the same space, held together in a kind of dance – still very loose and vaguely defined. These kinds of sketches can be a very helpful part of my design process. They draw out essential thematic ideas, before any first attempt at the logical arrangement of space. Quite often, much of what is discovered will find its way into the final product, in one way or another.

A watercolour painting in progress.