468 Interiors Copyright Goodheart-Willcox Co., Inc. A rendering can be extremely refined and detailed or very loose and quickly completed. Quality differences depend on time. If you are making quick sketches during the Schematic design phase, a few marker and colored pencil strokes quickly communicates an idea to a team member or client. If more time is available, the client may be willing to pay for a more sophisticated rendering. A client typically incurs this type of expense for a very large project that requires communication to different constituents. For example, a town hall project for a nearby community requires a different level of refinement and sophistication. Importance of Light To be good at rendering, you must pay attention to light—where it lands, shifts, or falls off a surface. Both natural and electric light create shade, shadow, and textural effects. They both offer different colors that impact visual perceptions relating to time of day and mood of space. Therefore, the type of light, location of light source, and the material covering an object all impact the actual lighting of the object. Objects have shade in areas that receive light indirectly. Where something blocks light from hitting a surface of an object, shadows develop. To understand how light strikes or enhances pieces of furniture, you have to look at where and how the light is naturally achieved in inte- riors around you. Hence, you learn to see spaces in a different way. What to Render A designer can render just about every type of two- and three-dimensional drawing. Floor plans are a favorite because they assist the client in understanding types and color of flooring proposed for the space(s). Shade and shadow can be added to give it a three-dimensional quality. The designer can easily develop elevations and sections from a floor plan and enhance them with color, texture, and shadow. All orthographic projections require shadow during rendering. The designer should consider the location of shadows prior to rendering, and then render shad- ows in colored pencil, ink, or marker. The designer can also enhance paraline and perspective drawings with rendering. Manual drawings impress the client—espe- cially if the designer renders them. Rendering Media There are many types of art media the interior designer can use to render an image. No one item does every- thing well. Therefore, most renderings require the use of several types of media. Following are some basic items that are successful in rendering beautiful images. Pencil Non-colored renderings can be developed using graphite pencils. While they create subtle and beautiful drawings, they do not reproduce as well as ink. See Figure 13-39. Wax-based colored pencils are easiest to use when render- ing. To work well, the designer needs to layer or manipulate color pencils. Without layering, colored pencils look grainy because the color is connecting only with the top surface of the paper. Color-pencil blenders are colorless but work magic! They blend color pencil lines and smooth the layers. Colored-pencil renderings vary greatly based on type and texture of paper used. In addition, the way the designer holds the pencil and the type of stroke he or she uses produces different effects. psynovec/Shutterstock.com Figure 13-39 Pencil renderings are subtle and interesting drawings.