My Recent Watercolor Rendering of Active Plaza in San Jose

This is a rendering I completed recently for a project in San Jose, California.  What you see has been designed by Kenneth Rodrigues + Partners of Mountain View, CA. with landscape elements designed by

Guzzardo Partnership, Inc. of San Francisco.  These consultants-in this case the architect and the landscape architect-do the important design work and share it with me, the illustrator, so I can bring it all together in a meaningful way which describes the nature of the project to the public audience.  The location for this project is a prominent corner of major streets in San Jose.  Replacing what is presently an older shopping center which is single-story, this new development would be comprised of two-story condos, a four-story assisted living center, a five-story hotel, and six-story residential over commercial and retail-which is part of what you see here.  As an illustrator for this project, my mission was to create a lively, sunny, and inviting plaza space with lots of outdoor seating for drinking and dining or just lounging and people-watching.  I tried to use the landscaping and trees as framing elements which would both soften the architecture and lend a park-like feel to the plaza.  I also tried to capture the modern-day activities to show in the social scene–people on their cell phones, waiting to meet up with friends, enjoying the outdoors with a meal or libation once they have gotten together-hopefully a realistic slice of life snapshot of modern life in 2020.  As you can see, there are two pavilion buildings of a commercial/retail nature that sit in the plaza.  These are intended to be focal elements in the composition.By keeping the contrast greatest in these areas of the drawing, the eye tends to go there, which creates focus and lends importance to the elements you are attempting to highlight.  Bright color is a similar tool to draw attention.  The brightest colors here are the umbrellas and the blooming trees in the landscape.  They will get noticed before the background architecture and support landscape-by intention.