Tiny Rooms to View

I've been an illustrator on and off for pretty much all of my adult life. Mostly technical illustration. Machines and the like. I'm really good at creating exploded diagrams of complex machinery. I enjoy it a lot. Just love burying myself in a machine, pulling it apart, putting it all back together again - all figuratively, of course. I usually work from engineering drawings. Occasionally, I actually go out on the factory floor and look at the machine. But not often. Most of the time, I just look at the drawings or models, roll the thing around in my head, and figure out the best way to explode it so that all of the pertinent parts are clearly visible. A lot of people would find it boring, but not me. It helps that it pays well too.

Lately, I've been getting a little bit more creative. Here's one of my latest drawings. It's a little bookstore. I got the idea from a book I read about 20 years ago. Always thought it would be a great idea for a real store. That was another thing I always wanted to do - own my own book store. Well, then a certain big book store chain drove all of the small, independent book stores out of business, and that career option went down the drain. But the store idea remained in my brain. It rolled around in their for years until it finally dribbled out onto paper. Ben's Books. A quiet, friendly place to browse or read or chat. Even a dog named Buster to greet you when you come in. Why not? 

Now I've turned it into a shadow box. Shadow boxes are also things I have always liked. When I was in high school, I was in drama. I acted, of course, but what I really loved was designing sets. Especially sets that had multiple layers. They were sort of like giant shadow boxes that you could walk around in. I did one for a play with changing outdoor locations. It consisted of sliding scrims of trees, rocks, bushes, etc. When the play called for a change of scene from forest to mountains, we could slide out most of the tree scrims and slide in rock scrims. It was challenging and fun to figure out how to do it quickly and convincingly. Now I'm doing the same thing with the buildings that have been percolating in my brain for almost half of a century.

Oh yes, buildings are in my brain too. I found my first architecture book when I was 12. Found it in the library, when I stumbled into an unfamiliar section. It was love at first site. I couldn't get enough. I got every book of house plans that our library had. When I ran out of books, I started designing my own houses. I never did become and architect - the reasons for which are too long and involved to go into here - but I never stopped designing houses in my spare time. Now, I'm turning some of those houses and other designs into shadow boxes.

These are a lot more fun to make than exploded diagrams of machines. The require thinking in 3 dimensions. Depth is important. In more ways than one. These need depth...and they add depth.

More to come.