1. notleia says:

    Awww yisss, architecture. Tho Gothic and Baroque are cool and all, I think they’re a bit much. I find pretty woodwork more compelling than stonework. There’s a lot of old craftsman houses where I live now, with noice, thick baseboards and casings and sweet built-in sideboards in the dining rooms.

    Do you follow the McMansion Hell blog at all? The author is liberal as heck and puts a lot of it into her criticism of stupid conspicuous consumption, but she’s definitely right about how blah and uggo the bourgeois imitation of stylish wealth is.

  2. Architecture is awesome. Regretfully, it’s one of the things that’s harder for me to design, draw and color now since I didn’t practice archictural drawing much as a kid. Usually I spent time drawing and coloring the main subject and left the backgrounds blank.

    Did anyone else do that as a kid, when it came to the things they drew, or colored in coloring books, or am I the only one that tended to leave the backgrounds blank?

  3. Ah, architecture – I understand the need for depth in detail, yet I often forget to add in those details while I’m writing my first draft. However, the way a character views a place or interacts with it can make a huge difference in the “realism” of a story.
    I’ll do this exercise you’ve set – look on the architecture around with fresh eyes, consider how to build it into the worlds I write.
    Thanks for the great article!

  4. Kathleen J Eavenson says:

    Timing is everything, isn’t it? This article with its Gothic cathedral illustration appeared so closely after the horrible fire in Notre Dame de Paris. It wasn’t Mark’s intent to write about that but the words about appreciating the buildings around you meshed with my thoughts this week.

What do you think?