University Hospitals Illustration Breakdown

Every week while driving to Tri-C to teach, I would pass the University Hospitals building and think to myself ‘I want to illustrate this’. I love the contrast of the big curved elements against the angular geometry. During my lunch breaks I would drive around this building taking reference photos to start modeling from.  Since I did not have blueprints to work off of, I used my reference photos.

I wanted this personal project to be about the exploration of a soft digital look as popularized by artists such as Dennis Allain, Studio JDK, and Jeff Stikeman. I searched the internet and came across this tutorial on creating a pencil drawing from a SketchUp model: http://www.alexhogrefe.com/blog/2012/9/9/sketches-part-2-extended.html.

SketchUp is a tool that I got away from over the past couple of years. After seeing work that artists are creating using SketchUp, I was blown away and wanted to give it a try again. Check this piece out: http://www.ronenbekerman.com/making-of-mediterranean-house-nookta/. My illustration is quite different from this link, but seeing this work made me realize that SketchUp is a robust tool for architectural illustration work.

The University Hospitals Ahuja Medical Center was the global architecture firm HKS Inc.

01 Reference Photos

02 C4D Model

I modeled this building using Cinema 4D. I’m much faster using Cinema 4D for modeling than SketchUp. That’s why I choose this route for the creation of the geometry. After playing around with sketch and toon for a while, I was not able to achieve the line quality I was looking for, so I used SketchUp for the final export of the multi-pass layers.

03 SketchUp Export

It’s so easy to get great linework out of SketchUp. With all the pre-built styles available, exporting a 2D graphic is a no brainer. I always export my lines in multiple passes. Pass 1, profiles turned on. Pass 2 , edges turned on. Pass 3, xray. Pass 4, profiles and edges off, and shadows turned on. Once I have all the passes re-assembled in Photoshop, I’ll add another layer and draw in a few construction lines on top of the model.

04 Creating Custom Brushes

Fun part! At this point I pulled out my sketchbook and started drawing linework for the creation of custom brushes in Photoshop. I wanted to have a few different line types to choose from so I created a several grasses and variations of straight and wiggly lines. Once the lines were complete, I scanned them, did a few adjustments (curves, contrast, etc), and made new brushes in Photoshop.

05 Rendering

I almost always start my renderings by adding in a sky. This sets the mood for the entire illustration. For this piece, I used a photo of a dusk sky, desaturated the color, and turned down the opacity. After that, I dabbed in some clouds using Photoshop brushes then overlaid them with my custom line work.

For the ground cover, again I used custom brushes from my sketchbook line drawings. For the foliage, I imported tree photographs from my library and overlaid these as well with custom lines. I left the photos inside the illustration, desaturated them and turned the opacity way down.

06 Final Tweaks

With the rendering complete, I placed a watercolor texture on top of the layer stack and set the blending mode to multiply. I felt the overall piece could benefit from a curves adjustment, so I added one to give the illustration more contrast between light and dark tones. Finally I grouped my lines and rendering together and masked out the entire illustration for the faded out look on the edges.

Below are a few detail shots and a second view I created from the same model.

Enjoy.