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Sketch Series: Parker Nussbaum

From the MARS Ascension Vehicle at the Johnson Space Center to the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, the products of Parker Nussbaum's sketches continue to reach new heights and audiences. The Houston-based industrial designer is well-versed in rapid prototyping and creating objects that marry both beauty and function. In June, Parker helped launch Rottet Collection during NeoCon 2017, and he's been on a roll ever since. In this Sketch Series installment, we delve into the organized chaos behind Parker's work.How did you first get into sketching/drawing?I have always liked drawing and actively sketched throughout most of my youth. I was lucky in that my parents took me to a lot of art museums growing up, so I learned to love the visual arts and explore them in my free time.It was not until college, however, that I really hit my stride and started to gain knowledge of form, composition, and technique. The transformation did not come easily. Having your drawings and ideas slammed during critiques pushes you to try to be more clear and fluid in form and style, not to mention learning the technique for industrial design drawing of Vizcomm (visual communication), which took a while to grasp.Today I still keep sketchbooks around and continue to further my skills in drawing and idea generation. Right now I have three in rotation: one for work and notes, another for product design ideas, and a personal one where I draw the most freely.Tell us about your drawings.Most of these drawings are some of my favorites from past projects. The bicycle-related drawings explore the functionality of bicycles and bicycle accessories for a startup project I worked on in conjunction with the [Gerald D. Hines] College of Architecture and the [C.T. Bauer] College of Business at the University of Houston, my alma mater. The living chandelier and oxygen-generating devices are studies from my thesis exploring different implementations of living media to combat indoor air pollution. The space craft design drawings are some human factor studies I did on the Mars Ascension Vehicle at NASA in conjunction with Lockheed Martin, studying flight seats and sleep hardware.They are quite different in their scope of product, but I wanted to show more fleshed-out drawings rather than the visual madness which constitutes most of my sketches.What do you sketch when you’re not at work?Nine times out of ten, it’s something from work that I just didn’t feel I got right. Usually through this sketch exercise, my perfectionism begins to lose its edge and the drawings descend into chaos. It’s in the chaos that I either find clarity or just begin to draw forms.Occasionally I’ll practice drawing people or landscapes, but usually they are very abstracted or quick expressions of a moment.What was the last thing that inspired you?Recently, I had the chance to see the David Hockney retrospective at The Centre Pompidou in Paris, and was truly inspired by the breadth and quality of his work. Not only was his style fluid and emotional, it also managed to retain a quality of simplicity and optimism. I read a quote by him on one of the signs that described how he wanted to master as many painting techniques/styles as he could, so that his work would not be typecast by art critics but instead retain a timeless quality. I think that is an admirable goal.What are your favorite tools?I actually really prefer to draw on loose leaf paper. 80-lb Hammermill paper is my standard. It handles Copic markers really well and does not wear out fine-tipped pens nearly as quickly as other types of paper. If I am going to use a sketch book, I have come to prefer the MUJI Size A6 Notebook, since it fits in my back pocket but still has enough structure.For drawing utensils, I love Marvy LePens, the MUJI 0.5mm black ballpoint, Pilot Fineliners, and Faber-Castell pencils. When do you find the time?I do some sketching at work on a daily basis, but it’s rough - almost like a data dump, spilling out shapes, notes, and thumbnail ideas. I suppose the really tight and clean drawings I do are at home on the weekends when everything is a bit quieter and I can focus on the minutiae. I like when the drawing experience transcends into being a meditative experience.

UncategorizedSeptember 18, 2017Art, Corporate Culture, Culture, Employees, Rottet Studio, Sketch Series

Sketch Series: Harout Dedeyan

With a background in architecture, it is easy to understand Associate Principal Harout Dedeyan's fascination with the built environment. Even when he is not working, the Los Angeles-based employee enjoys mixing business with pleasure - that is, incorporating architecture into his illuminating photography. For this Sketch Series we asked Harout to show us what life looks like through a short-shift lens.Tell us about your photographs.The photos you see here are part of a series called Art on Architecture, something I started two years ago. I shoot buildings that are used as canvasses, or I use them as backdrops to public art. Sometimes the architecture gets left out and I just shoot the art, other times the reverse. I then print them on archival paper, create handmade postcards and send them to people dear to me, with whom I want to stay in touch.I love this old fashioned exercise in an age of electrons traveling at the speed of light. I don’t want anyone to ‘follow’ me or ‘like’ my pictures. Sometimes it’s very soothing to slow down and go back in time.I also enlarge and frame the pictures, hoping one day to have the opportunity to show them.How did you first get into photography?On my 12th birthday, my aunt Elizabeth gave me a Kodak Instamatic. After the first roll of black and white film I was hooked. Throughout the years the Instamatic morphed into an SLR, medium format, 4x5… What followed were classes in architectural and product photography and a small side business shooting architectural models. My trick was getting very close and using a short shift-lens giving the model a very realistic look at eye level instead of the bird’s eye views prevalent at the time. Eventually architecture became a career, photography turning into a hobby.What are some of the subjects that you’re interested in photographing?I’m mostly interested in photographing the built environment. I like responding to places, looking at marks and traces, making the over-looked noticed, acknowledged through my photographs.What was the last thing that inspired you?I once saw an exhibition by Robert Holgren called Toy Camera Works. A successful commercial photographer puts his expensive gear and gizmos aside and uses a toy camera for his personal work. It was inspiring, and very appealing.

UncategorizedJune 15, 2017Art, Corporate Culture, Culture, Employees, Rottet Studio, Sketch Series

Sketch Series: Ruthie Chen

Logo brainstorm for a friend's medical company - Communiclear was a working name

"The Kiss" (1880-1881), Auguste Rodin at the Baltimore Museum of Art

"Bather Fixing Her Hair" (1930), Aristide Maillol at the Baltimore Museum of Art

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Ruthie Chen has a notebook for each side of her brain - one for meticulous note-taking and list-making, and one for more free-form journaling and sketching. "I go back and forth between using design as a mode of expression and communication, which are two different things," Ruthie says. "All design, art, and writing contains aspects of both, but you should always ask who your audience is - the answer should rarely be 'myself.'" In this Sketch Series installment, we asked the Houston-based Marketing Assistant how she strikes a balance between the two. How did you first get into sketching/drawing?I used to hoard notebooks, scribbling or writing in the first few pages before tossing one aside for another – my childhood room is still littered with them. I started journaling regularly right before middle school, but I didn’t start keeping a sketchbook until my high school art classes required one.These days, I have two notebooks – a daily planner for work that I use to keep track of to-do lists, appointments, and meetings, and a personal sketchbook. I find that I go through spurts with my sketchbooks. I’m so used to recording visual information with my phone first that capturing a moment on paper seems almost counter intuitive at times, even if the process of doing so is ultimately the most authentic way to commit something to memory. To be honest, sketchbooks feel intimidating to me; I’m precious to a fault about what goes on the page and tend to overthink things. As a result, my sketches often lack a certain spontaneity and freshness, something I am slowly trying to overcome.Tell us about your drawings.Many of the pages in my sketchbook are a combination of words and visuals, which I think reflects how my brain works. Mostly, they’re a reflection of what’s around or in front of me at the time. I’m still in the imitative stages of capturing things visually – meaning, I can copy from a photograph or draw from life, but I can’t conjure images from my mind without a concrete visual reference. For instance, I tend to record my dreams verbally because I find that, vivid as they are, visuals don’t quite do them justice.What do you sketch when you’re not at work?Scenes from travel or day to day life, hand-lettering and typography, and figure drawings. I like to take a sketchbook with me when I travel – it forces me to take the time to document new sights and sounds that I wouldn’t have otherwise noticed.In terms of hand-lettering, I follow a lot of typography and design accounts on Instagram which are endless sources of inspiration. I’ve recently been interested in monogram logos – in the way the same letterforms can be manipulated over and over again to create vastly different effects, almost like a mini optical illusion. There’s so much you can do with the negative space between forms or the perspective to make something clever and visually arresting.I’ve always loved drawing the human figure – during my first figure-drawing exercise in high school, my teacher instructed us not to take our eyes off of the model or our pens off of the paper. It was a true lesson in abstracting forms and learning to draw what you really see, not what you think you see. The female form, in particular, is interesting to capture because it carries so much historical and cultural weight - the body is both personal and political.What was the last thing that inspired you?A close friend lent me a copy of Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte. The novel follows four twentysomethings in millennial San Francisco as they navigate their careers and relationships. The writer's observations are so sharp and darkly witty - one in particular stood out to me: "Cities that tolerate everything tolerate mediocrity."What are your favorite tools?For taking notes and drawing, I love MUJI Gel-Ink Ballpoint Pens in 0.38mm or 0.5mm. I have them in every color. I am a meticulous note-taker, probably some sort of deeply ingrained habit from school, and the MUJI pens allow me to write quickly with minimal resistance. When I need to use pencil, I’ve actually grown really fond of the Paper Mate Sharpwriter Mechanical Pencils that we stock in the office. My current sketchbook is a classic hard cover Moleskine with blank pages, but I prefer the soft cover with dotted grid pages. Once in a blue moon, when I’m feeling ambitious, I like drawing with charcoal and conte crayon. When do you find the time?Ha - I don't. I try to wake up a few hours early at least once a week to sketch or write - my ideas are the most fresh in the morning.

UncategorizedMarch 21, 2017Art, Corporate Culture, Culture, Employees, Rottet Studio, Sketch Series

Sketch Series: Ashley Liu

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Ashley Liu's doodles are as vibrant and playful as the designer herself. The New York-based employee has sketches dating back to her design school days, though she typically approaches drawing with a fun and whimsical approach. From conference calls to the streets of South America, Ashley spoke with us about the role that her doodles play in not taking herself too seriously.How did you first get into sketching/drawing? I started to sketch when applying to design school. I actually don't keep a regular sketchbook. I usually grab any available papers or even napkins when I want to draw.Tell us about your drawings. I made these stair railing sketches and 3D detail studies for a current hotel project in San Francisco, California. We presented different options to the client based on my design:Here are a few doodles from a super long conference call with all consultants:This bathroom design was for a school project, designed for a Christian Louboutin store, with high heels displayed on the walls: When I was studying at the New York School of Interior Design, I took an accessories class at the Fashion Institute of Technology where we designed handbags, chairs with different "hairstyles," and other fun iterations of furniture design:What do you sketch when you’re not at work?Anything - anything that comes into my mind! I sometimes draw food when I’m in a restaurant, and buildings and street views when I’m traveling. In my last trip to Cartagena, Columbia, I sat in a cute restaurant, ordered a cup of coffee, and asked for milk for my coffee. The waitress didn’t understand English and I don’t speak Spanish, so she kept giving me sugar, spoons, all kinds of stuff, but not milk! So I ended up grabbing a piece of napkin and drew on it, and then she smiled, and gave me milk. I think she ended up keeping my drawing.What are your favorite tools?A black pen – it looks more professional and cool!What was the last thing that inspired you?The Tree Hotel (The 7th room).

UncategorizedMarch 16, 2017Corporate Culture, Culture, Employees, Rottet Studio, Sketch Series

Sketch Series: Mark Borkowski

Stone Shop Drawings for the Presidential Bungalows at the Beverly Hills Hotel

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Welcome to our "Sketch Series," a periodic peek into the notebooks and minds of Rottet Studio designers. Through their notes, doodles, and working sketches, we hope you get a glimpse of the design process behind some of our award-winning projects - and the tools we grab when inspiration strikes. In this installation, we hear from Mark Borkowski, AIA, LEED AP, a Los Angeles-based senior designer, about how his sketches take different forms depending on the function they serve.Tell us about your drawings. When I heard about this segment my first thought was, “I’ve got this covered, easy.” But as I started looking through my sketchbooks, I wasn’t finding any good sketches, just lots of notes and basic brutish sketches that help me work out how to detail something. Not much to write home about. Needless to say, I was a bit baffled. I knew I had done several decent looking sketches and yet I wasn’t finding any of them, at least not in any of my sketchbooks. So I went back to work and let it go for a bit. Later in the week, when I was showing someone in the office a detail from another project in one of my half size sets, it finally dawned on me that all my really good sketches are littered throughout my half-sized field sets and Construction Administration responses to things like submittals and RFIs. It is only when I needed to communicate a design or detail idea to someone out in the field that I was doing some of my best sketch work.The sketches included cover a full range: pages from my day-to-day sketchbook, scans from submittal responses, scans of pages from my half-sized field sets. The submittal responses have the most polished sketches based on time and the need to communicate design intent. The sketches from the half-sized sets are a bit rougher, with a certain immediacy to them that comes from sketching something while standing around a group of subconsultants trying to describe the finer points of our design (or sorting out a ‘Plan B’ based on field conditions). Finally, the sketches in my sketchbook are a loose kind of shorthand with very little organization or polish - I know what it is supposed to represent, so there’s not as much need to dress it up.How did you first get into sketching and drawing?It goes all the way back to grade school/high school, when I would doodle regularly in my subject notebooks for each class. Little vignettes and sketchy marginalia are littered throughout the pages, sharing space with the inventor of the cotton gin, Avogadro’s number and quadratic equations. In college, one of the things the architecture program impressed on us fairly early on was the need to keep a design sketchbook, so I started to keep a ‘formal’ sketchbook for my design classes. Meantime, the trend of sketching in my class notebooks continued, just with a bit more of an architectural bent. As for my current sketchbook, I would characterize it as a junk drawer for my notes, rough calculations, square footages, furniture piece names, fabric names, meeting notes and yes, the occasional sketch.What do you sketch when you’re not at work?Usually work-related things. When there is a particularly challenging detail I am trying to work out, I will think about it as I am going about my business at home. If something comes to me, I will sketch it out on whatever is handy: backs of envelopes, business cards or newspaper articles. It does not have to be a pristine surface, just a space to allow me to hammer out some of the thoughts I have at the time that I need to get down before they slip away. It gives me a chance to test my idea and decide whether it will work or not, as well as refine it to a point where I can formally draft it up.What are your favorite tools?The Bee Paper, Super Deluxe 9in. x 6in., 93lb 150gsm 60 sheet notebook. It has a sticker on it that says, “The Only Sketch Book You Will Ever Need” (underline theirs) which I find to be a humorous statement. Yeah, it is the only sketch book you will ever need… until you run out of pages and have to buy another Bee Paper Super Deluxe sketchbook!I like this sketchbook for the heavy weight paper that allows me to write/draw on both sides of the sheet without much in the way of bleed through. I also like it because it is spiral bound and can be folded over to one sheet, which takes up less space on the desk and gives you a nice flat surface to work on. As for drawing utensils, I generally stick to the Precise V5 rolling ball ink pens. I tend toward pen/ink sketches and only venture into pencil when I feel like getting softer transitions and gradients, as well as graphite all over everything. It can get quite messy for me, which is why I gravitate towards ink pens for most of my sketch work.Are there certain techniques, themes, subjects or explorations that you tend to focus on?For some reason, stairs show up in a lot of my sketches - that and volumetric studies, when I am trying to figure out the three-dimensional footprint of something based on reviewing a bunch of two dimensional references. The other things that seem to show up a lot are enlarged details, relating how things fit together. These tend to be wall, ceiling, or door elements which usually find their way into a detail at some point down the road.What was the last thing that inspired you?I don’t know if it was inspiring as much as it was thought provoking. There is a blog I follow and in one of the posts, the artist was trying to recreate/reinterpret a drawing done by another artist from several years prior, which was seen as something of a masterpiece in the realm of illustration. After a few attempts, the artist was still having trouble reproducing the essence of the original with the reinterpreted subject matter. To try and figure it out, he enlisted the help of the readers, showing the original along with all the attempts to rework it, and asked them to weigh in on the matter. For some reason, I got completely sucked in. What was it about the first illustration that resisted reinterpretation? And what moves or modifications could the artist possibly make to get close to the flavor of the original? What does that say about emulating the work of others and that work’s ability to or resistance of being copied? There is value in trying to copy something, for sure, but it comes more from the analysis of what makes the copy turn out good, bad, or mediocre when compared to the original. In a way, it forced me to think more in terms of criticism than in execution or technique.

UncategorizedMarch 14, 2017Corporate Culture, Culture, Employees, Rottet Studio, Sketch Series

Sketch Series: Ana Maria Nater

The American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Ana Maria Nater spends her evenings doing rapidfire sketches using salvaged materials - chopsticks and ink, a discarded newspaper clipping - as part of a drawing class. We asked Ana Maria, a designer in our New York studio, what inspired her to start drawing again and how taking pen to paper has made her a better designer.Tell us about your drawings.These are some sketches I’ve done so far in a class I am currently taking at Parsons School of Design. Right now, we are just doing very rapid sketches of objects - literally in seconds - as we need to learn how to abstract what we are seeing (chair, stool, umbrella, etc.). We are also learning how to use different drawing tools. For example, some of my sketches were drawn using chopsticks and ink in whatever material I could find laying around the room. We've recently started to sketch some interior spaces (Metropolitan Museum and Chelsea Market), and then we will start to learn how to render them.I am taking this class because I’ve always been a big fan of free-hand drawings and after seeing the Valencia Texican Court sketches [by Maksim Koloskov], something sparked inside me and motivated me to take a class! I think that sketching is such a useful tool for designers to communicate their ideas. Even a scribble can become a great design later on.How did you first get into sketching/drawing?I’d say ever since I was in elementary school, I've enjoyed painting and drawing. Every summer as a child, I was enrolled in the art camp that the Museo de Arte de Ponce (in Puerto Rico) offered. I have a travel sketchbook that I sketch in from time to time, but I have to admit haven’t used it in a while. I used to take it everywhere I traveled and tried to sketch something that caught my eye in every place I went.What do you sketch when you’re not at work? I really like going to public spaces to sketch, whether they are of interior spaces or exterior ones. I enjoy sketching buildings because I think that even if the building does not physically change, the light, the people, and the weather make for a different experience each time, which I try to capture in the drawing.What was the last thing that inspired you?Art Basel Miami 2016.What are your favorite tools?I like to sketch with Pigma MICRON pens and when I have the time and space, I like to get a little creative and just use a chopstick and black ink. I really like for the lines not to be perfect, and the chopstick/ink combination gives you different line weights with just a stroke.When do you find the time?I haven’t lately, which is why I enrolled again in a night class to try to force myself into doing something I like and truly enjoy. I hope that after this class it becomes a habit.