"That irregular and intimate quality...
...of things made entirely by the human hand." -Willa Cather.
In an age of ever-more advanced digital tools (architects know programs like AutoCAD, Revit and Rhino), there's still nothing like a drawing done by hand. For me, at least. There's definitely a time and place for CAD and 3-D software, but I feel most free as a designer with a pencil in my hand and a sheet of trace paper on my desk. This is "thinking by drawing" at it's simplest and my clients often seem to appreciate the looseness and spontaneity of hand sketches over the perfectly straight lines of a computer printout.
When drawing from life, drawing forces one to truly see and understand: proportions, how the parts come together to form a whole, how a building sits in a landscape or how a space feels.
Here are a few recent pieces from my travels last year.