Newsletter of the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University
A book project containing hundreds of drawings by a professor of architecture at Texas A&M has come one step closer to reality through a $1,200 grant from the university’s Academy for the Visual and Performing Arts.
“Drawing in the Digital Age” currently contains more than 300 of Davison’s classroom drawings (see examples in slide show) included in 180 pages in various stages of completion, but much of the drawings’ freehand text is unintelligible.
The grant will enable Master of Architecture student Jing Zhao to photograph the original drawings, superimpose digitally generated masks of text on the drawings to make the original text legible and then print the images to see how they will appear in book form.
“Some of the pages that I am most pleased with are the ones in which the text is so integrated with the imagery that it is virtually unreadable,” he said in the grant proposal.
Ten years in development, the book began as Davison’s classroom illustrations of drawing principles.
“For example, I might begin to make a drawing that is intended to be an example of a particular drawing principle; say, two-point perspective,” he said. “The drawing is in fact a two-point perspective, initially, but becomes more interesting to me because of the way a tension is developing between the line quality and the color, or it seems appropriate to introduce some collage elements at a certain point.”
The Texas A&M Academy for the Visual and Performing Arts, headed by Ward Wells, professor of architecture, enhances support for visual and performing arts at Texas A&M University and coordinates its support of the arts with the surrounding community.
It strives to enhance the educational experiences of students preparing to pursue careers in the arts and exposes the general student population to the richness of the creative act.
- Posted: July 20, 2009 -
