Summer Cottage - a design by Frank Lloyd Wright

Randal Birkey has created architectural illustrations of many Frank Lloyd Wright architectural designs for his personal portfolio of architectural illustration work. This rendering is based upon a summer cottage design and sketch of Wright’s. The medium Randal used is color pencil on 20″ x 30″ medium gray illustration board. It is interesting to work in both directions from neutral gray, adding light colors and dark colors from the middle of the value range.

This custom house was designed by an architecture firm called Architectura, located in suburban Chicago, in the Prairie School style of Frank Lloyd Wright. Randal was asked to render the home for the architect to better enable his client to visualize how the design would look when completed.

Final Custom Prairie School House Rendering

Randal did the wireframe line work in a 3D software and then transferred it to 2D drawing programs and printed the linework on various types of sketch and drawing paper. He first did a series of quick color studies like the one shown below, to work out the final values and color palette. Sometimes the early sketches and studies have a unique quality of their own.

A Color Study of the Custom Prairie School House Design