2019 Sketchbook- Architectural Ideas and Urban Sketching

Hi, my name is Jamie Roberts, and I'd like to share with you a sketchbook from 2019. This is a sketchbook that I did in the first half of 2019, which was about January to about July. The sketchbook is Hemul, the logo. It's a German company. I'm sure I'm pronouncing the name wrong. I bought this at Flax in San Francisco, and then I put this postcard on it. I glued this postcard down. The sketchbook is about five and three quarters by eight and a quarter. That's A5 size. And what I typically do in my sketchbooks is two things. I'm an architect, and I also paint. So I do architectural ideas and also watercolor, like urban sketching in and around San Francisco. And that's the reason for the San Francisco postcard. So just opening up here, I put number one because it's the first sketchbook of the year, 2019. And then I love going to Phil's Coffee and getting a coffee. And so this I drew in egg tempera. And I actually drew it on a different piece of paper and glued it down to the notebook. So here is an idea that I have for an architectural form. It's basically like a crystalline shape for a building. And because it's crystalline shape, it has a lot of triangles. And structurally, this would be very strong. So you could definitely build this out of various different materials. And it would be actually a very strong building because everything's triangulated. And then you could add sheets of glass and solid elements. And so at first, I took a look at it to see what would it look like vertically. And then I took a study just to see what it would look like, the same forms horizontally. And so as an architectural idea, it's just an idea for a form, not fully developed. But I think it's a good idea for a project. So this is a sketch that I drew at the Equator coffee shop at Fort Mason. And this is the guard shack right outside the coffee shop. And this is the guard shack for Fort Mason. So I was taking a look at the tile roofs and whatnot. I was trying this ink that was supposed to be waterproof. But on this paper, it's not waterproof. And so it ended up smudging and making a mess. This is a very bad drawing of my camera. It's kind of embarrassing how bad it is. This is an idea I had for an architectural idea. Basically, it's just a flat plain roof. And this is a hillside. And so it's got a retaining wall, and then a flat plain roof, and then just a platform. And so you have two kind of posts holding up the roof, flat platform, retaining wall, and flat roof. And then this is taking that same idea and developing it a little further. So here is a living room, a kitchen, a bedroom, bedroom, you know, like a family room type of thing. And then you would go upstairs, and there would be a balcony overlooking like a two-story space here. This is a pool. And this is the guest housing. And this shows how the roof would be split. You would have a lower roof, and then an upper roof for this two-story space. Here, I'm just playing around with how to draw faces and in watercolor. And first, I tried pen and ink. And then I just went to pencil, and pencil ended up being a little bit better. Just some quick sketches. Here's another idea that I've been playing around with for a long time now. It's basically a canopy to a gas station. And so here are the posts that you see at a gas station, and then a canopy. And in this case, it's not just a flat canopy, but a butterfly roof canopy with a glass enclosure. And so this would be the whole building. And so it'd be about 20 feet by about 40 feet. And then here, I'm just playing around with if it was a glass enclosure, what are the mullions? What do the looking at trying to do like a studio and a study and just like a small little building. I didn't really like this. I kind of thought it was stupid looking. But what I ended up doing was this, which I really like. This is the elevation on this side. And then this is a section through the building on this side. And so it's about 20, 30 feet high to here. And basically, it's just a square box of a building with a dome on top. And it's two stories. There's the first story with lots of books, and then second story with more bookcases, and then windows and a dome. And so I really like this idea. It's very simple. It would make a great studio or art space or, you know, study, make a great study with all those books. So anyway, that's, that's an idea that I really like. Here, I was drawing in Monterey. And it was a very foggy, wet day. And the water, it was so wet that the watercolor wouldn't stick to the page. And so you can see here where I laid down watercolor wash, and it just wouldn't stick. And so I ended up giving up on this, this drawing. This is very similar. This was in San Francisco. This is at Ocean Beach. And this is, this is Golden Gate Park over here. And this is Ocean Beach here. And it was so foggy and wet and cold, that again, the watercolor just wouldn't stick to the page. You can see it's just not sticking here. So again, I tried for a little bit and then gave up. This is another idea, architectural idea I had. And really all it was, was let's create some wavy walls, maybe kind of made out of paper or something. So wavy walls, and then like a wavy roof. And then just put a glass box enclosure and a platform. And that's, that's the whole building. And looks interesting. I'm not sure that would make a great building, but it's, looks interesting. Here is an idea. I was just playing around with a brush, ink, inking with a brush. I haven't inked with a brush in years. I was just seeing what it would look like. And it's interesting, but I don't, I don't think it looks that great. So here is an architectural idea that I had. And this is the plan. And this is the section through the, through the building. And so basically it's going back to that gas station canopy idea, where there's a post and then a canopy held up by the post. And in this situation, you have a platform. So there'd be a steel plat, steel frame platform, there'd be a steel frame canopy, and then there would be a glass enclosure. And so that's, that's, this is the plan for that. It's very simple. It's 50 feet long by 20 feet long. It could be all prefabricated offsite and then built, assembled onsite. This is a living room. This is a dining room. This is the kitchen, two bathrooms here, and two bedrooms. And so basically you have everything that you would need in this one little space. This is the glass enclosure. This is the platform that it's sitting on. And then, as I said, again, here's the platform, here's the glass enclosure, and then here's the canopy roof. So very, very simple space, very simple to manufacture. The foundation is very simple to do. It's just posts in a simple foundation. So very, very easy to do. So I'm exploring the idea of doing a book based on my sketchbooks, based on my urban sketching. And so I was going to call it San Francisco Magnificent Ruin. And in the postcards, they always fill this in and put it like a picture in here. And so I was thinking about maybe in Photoshop or something, dropping pictures in here of some of the watercolors that I did of San Francisco. And it'd be like a postcard. This would be the front page of the book, and it would look like a postcard, very similar to this. And so here's a second idea that I had for the typography of it. Again, the pictures could go in here. And then this is the third option I had for typography. Obviously, you couldn't get a picture in here, but it's a third idea. I did this from a photograph. I generally don't work from photographs. This is Festival Hall. That was in the Panama Pacific Exposition of, I think it was 1915. And so this was in San Francisco. I was just playing around with seeing if I wanted to do anything from historic photographs. And I realized I'm really just not interested in working from photographs. Here's a technique that I use a lot. I sketch something on a piece of trace, and then I just glue it down into my notebook. And here, I've been using not three by five cards, but business card sizes. And I love this paper. It's like business card paper, and it's really good for watercolors. And so I've been doing little thumbnail sketches on these business card paper. It's actually these mini cards. I've been using these mini cards that I got from a Japanese store, and I love them. They're great paper. So anyway, I've been doing little thumbnail sketches here instead of in my notebooks. And I'll do that. And then if I really like it, I'll just stick it in my notebook. This is a failed attempt to use gouache. So what I did was I went in in pen and ink and in various things. I went in and laid down the ink, and then I went back in with gouache and tried to color it using gouache. And I realized that I haven't used gouache in years, and I really suck at it. And anyway, it was just a failed experiment there. Just to prove that not everything you do comes out looking great in your sketchbook. This came out a little bit better. This was a watercolor wash. And then over that watercolor wash, I went in with some gouache highlights, and this worked much better. This is eucalyptus leaves, which are on the Presidio of San Francisco. And it's a predominant tree there. I thought that the eucalyptus leaves were like the state leaf of California, but I may be wrong. This is a sketch I did from Berkeley looking over at San Francisco, and it was a very foggy day. So you could barely see anything. But this is the new Salesforce Tower that is literally twice as big as any building downtown. And it just sticks out like a sore thumb. It's very depressing to see a building. This is the floor plan to the section that I drew. So it's the floor plan to this sketch. And all I'm showing is that it's a square box building, and these are the bookcases, and then it would have four doors leading out. That's about it. It's 25 feet wide by 25 feet, and very simple floor plan. This is called the Portals of the Past. It's in Golden Gate Park, and it was part of the Panama Pacific Exposition, I think from 1915. And they moved it to Golden Gate Park, and it's been sitting by this little lake there since then. And I don't think anybody even notices this thing. This is a view of San Francisco from Alta Vista Park, which is one of the hills in San Francisco. And I was trying to draw a Sutro Tower here, and then the fog came in and pretty much obscured everything. So basically, this is a watercolor of fog. I had my tooth broken out recently, and I got a plaster mold of my teeth in order to build a new tooth. And I ended up just drawing the plaster mold. And obviously, you could tell I wasn't too happy about having my tooth broken out. But this is egg tempera. It's not watercolor. And in egg tempera, you can do this very tight crosshatching, which is very good, and you can go back in with whites and grays and stuff. So I was really just playing around with the egg tempera medium and crosshatching here. This is a diagram from hopefully the forthcoming book that I'm working on, the Magnificent Ruin book. This is some spatial diagrams that I was doing for a different video, just to show how to do spatial diagramming. More spatial diagramming. More spatial diagramming. This is actually a diagram by Leonardo da Vinci. He was trying to diagram a building here. Floor plan. I was trying to do a variation of this floor plan with this floor plan using this idea. So this idea got developed into this. And so I do this a lot, where I have an idea, and then I end up thinking about it and developing it further as I'm working on it. This, I think I was sitting by the de Young Museum, and I ended up drawing Sutro Tower from the de Young Museum. And it was a pretty sunny day that day. And then again, this is going back to this idea. So this is the floor plan. This is what it would look like in elevation. More spatial diagramming. So this is a sketch I did. I did it on trace, and then I photocopied it and colored it in, and then stuck it in my notebook. And then this looked a little bit too dark. So I ended up going with this one, which looks even lighter. I'm not sure which one I like. I was putting the colors over here to play around with colors. But maybe I should show this one. This color, this yellow color, is what San Francisco was originally like before development. And the blue color is the kind of wetlands that was in San Francisco. And this red color is how they filled in all of this area in San Francisco. So they basically filled, this is all landfill. And then they filled in all of the wetlands too. So there's no more wetlands. And so this outline is the new outline, whereas this is the old outline. And what you can see from this thing is that San Francisco is San Francisco is very man-made. It's a very man-made place. You think it looks very natural. There's all these natural features like hills and whatnot. But San Francisco is very man-made. This was a sketch I did. I didn't have time to finish it. It kicked me out of the building before I had time to finish it. These are more spatial diagrams. This is a pendentive dome with oculus. More spatial diagrams. And again, this is from a video that I did. You can go on and take a look at that video. This is an idea that I had for a building. And basically, it's kind of like, it's all intention. The whole building is intention. So there is a platform and there are wires that hold the platform in place. And it's almost like a suspension bridge. And so this is the bridge part, the suspension wires coming down. The platform is here. And then this kind of skin of the building would be pulled up to almost make it look like, you know, the reinforce that idea of tension. And then this is the platform. It'd be 80 feet by 20 feet, the platform itself. And then you could put a house in here. You could put a living room and a kitchen and bathroom. And then there'd be a second floor platform that's open also. So this is quick little idea I had. Again, what I did was, I did this on trace. You can barely see it probably. Really quickly in pen. And then I just glued it into my notebook. This is just a quick sketch that I did on trace. This is Yoda. Yoda is by Industrial Light and Magic in San Francisco. So anyway, Yoda is a statue outside of Industrial Light and Magic. And I drew that. And so this goes from here all the way to here. So this is what I like about this paper. You can draw on both sides of the paper and it's exactly the same. What I did was, I went out and I sketched this in Presidio, on the Presidio of San Francisco. And this is Chrissy Field in San Francisco. This is the field itself. This is what I call Chrissy Swamp because they turned it into wetlands. And you can see San Francisco in the background here. And then this is, I guess it's Chrissy Beach, but it's right on, it's basically on the Presidio. And you can see the Bay Bridge in the background. You can see the Palace of Fine Arts in the background here. And the reason they turned this back, so this used to be an airfield. And this used to be one of the first airfields in the United States. I think it was the first airfield on the West Coast. And they turned this whole thing, and this was part of the Presidio and an airfield on the Presidio. When this reverted back to civilian use, they went back in and dug this up and turned this back into a wetland. And the reason they did that, going back to this picture here, maybe I should zoom in a little bit, going back to this picture here, this is the area here. So this is Chrissy Field. This actually is Chrissy Field right here. And so this was wetlands years ago. And so what the people did was they decided, oh, let's turn some of this back into wetland, which I think is an absolutely stupid idea, because look at this area. Why don't you just dig this up and turn this back into wetland? It's ridiculous. This is prime real estate that you're turning into a wetland. But anyway, that's what they did. They turned it into wetland. So here we are with some architectural ideas. I was thinking some kind of grouping of these kind of forms. And then I went back to this idea and I said, what would happen if I grouped these forms together? And I came up with this. And what it reminded me was of the Fortress of Solitude from Superman. And so that's what it reminded me of. But if you group those together, I think it turned into a pretty interesting form of a building. And then this is what it would look like in floor plan. And again, I'm using these little cards and drawing little thumbnail sketches on the cards. And then if I like them, I just glue them into my notebook. This is actually done on Trace. I was just doing some quick sketches on Trace and this one looked interesting. So I glued it into my notebook. These are taking this kind of idea, these kind of forms and developing it a little bit further. So here is this form kind of explored a little bit and then in plan. And then this is supposed to be a section, a section through the building. And then this is looking at it horizontally like I did previously. And this is looking at it from above. And then this is looking at a section through it. So interesting forms. I'm not sure if they would make great buildings, but it's interesting to take a look at and study. And here I'm just kind of looking at it a little bit more. This is the floor plan and then this is an elevation of what it might look like. And then here is a section looking through, you know, kind of cut right here somewhere, looking through and seeing what these forms might look like from the inside. And I think that they look really cool. I don't know if it would make a great building or not, but it's interesting. So this is, I sketched this on site and then I inked it in the studio. Again, playing around with ink, inking with a brush. I'm not sure how good it is or whether I like it anymore. And then finally, this is getting towards the end of the notebook. And this is from my other video that I just recently did about spatial design. And what I did to create that video is instead of writing out a script, what I did was I did thumbnail sketches of the storyboard of the video. And so basically I'm storyboarding out the storyboard to the video. So this was the first storyboard, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh. And again, I'm using this paper, these little things, and just gluing them in here. I used to be years ago, years ago, I used to be a storyboard artist and I storyboarded several movies. So here I'm just storyboarding videos. So if you're producing videos, storyboarding, I think is key to doing a good video. And then here's just some ideas that ended up going into my notebook, but they started off as little thumbnail sketches. So this started off as a little thumbnail sketch and then I drew it a little bit larger in my sketchbook. This started off as a thumbnail sketch. This is actually the floor plan to this. And this thumbnail sketch, this is a thumbnail sketch of a computer case, actually, I was playing around with. So there you have it. My sketchbook from 2019, first half of 2019. Jamie Roberts, Jamie Roberts' sketchbook from 2019. And some ideas, architectural ideas, and some urban sketching from San Francisco. Okay. Thank you for watching and I hope you will click and subscribe. Thanks. Bye.