Architectural Renderings for San Francisco Projects

Today I am featuring many of the architectural illustrations I have done with the architectural firm of Van Meter Williams Pollack of San Francisco, California.  And in particular, I am featuring the projects they have designed for San Francisco and the immediate environs.  I think I started doing renderings for VMWP in 1992 or 1993, so it’s been a longstanding relationship.  I work freelance as an illustrator, and this artwork shown here is all commissioned on a freelance basis, when they have need for my services.  Most of the projects are multi-family residential in nature, sometimes purely market-driven, many times with an affordable housing component.  When VMWP presents one of their current design projects to the public, either for disclosure, or for public input and comment, they usually include my artwork as a tool for describing their ideas.  Shown alongside the plans and elevations, the perspective renderings I create tend to bring the design to life for the audience.  Because the drawings show people, cars, streetlights, and landscaping, the public viewers are more engaged with these images.  In a way, the renderings are easier to understand, and easier to relate to, than the more technical drawings that the architect displays.  And although these perspective renderings can be produced digitally–what we now term computer-generated 3D imaging–the effectiveness of purely computer-generated images is often inferior.  It depends on the project, but I think most architects would agree with that statement.  I think that for presenting many architectural projects to the public, an architect can get by without hand-drawn perspectives, but if you really want to wow the viewers and get them on your side, there is no greater tool for presentation than artwork that is created by hand.  It lends a human element to all the hard edges and lines that are the stock and trade of the plans and elevations.  So, here are many of the watercolors, or color pencil drawings, I have done for VMWP for their projects either in San Francisco or nearby.