Creating Artistic Sketches in SketchUp: Styles and Techniques Explained

Exploring SketchUp Styles and Creating Artistic Representations

Discover the functionality of SketchUp styles and the artistic edge it brings to 3D modeling. Learn how to modify, apply, and export your designs in various styles to create unique, artistic representations of your models.

Key Insights

  • SketchUp includes a wide variety of built-in styles that can be modified to create unique artistic representations of your design. You can adjust the level of detail, background textures, and even the color of the sky and ground plane to customize your view.
  • SketchUp allows you to save and apply different styles to various views of your model. You can create scenes with different styles applied, giving you flexibility in presenting different aspects of your project.
  • Exporting your views in different styles can showcase the versatility and artistic potential of SketchUp. From sketch-like drawings to precise 3D models, the styles can be used to create a varied portfolio of your designs.

Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.

All right, in this final video we're going to talk about SketchUp styles and art styles that are built into SketchUp. SketchUp has a bunch of styles that are built into SketchUp that are located under styles and select and under this drop down menu you can see that there are some style builder competition winners, some assorted styles, and various other different types of styles.

These were all created in a standalone application called style builder. We will not get into that program in this class, however we'll just utilize the pre-loaded styles that I have here. If I was to click on say for example scribble on masonite you can see that it automatically kind of changed the style to this kind of textured background and line work.

We're going to use a combination and modify some of these styles to create some unique views and an artistic representation of our building. So let's go over to our final style right here and let's go into just a general view where we can see a good variety of elements in this project somewhere like right around here. We don't need the shadows on for right now but let's go create some styles.

If you also open up our scenes we should be able to see that we have these things checked on which shows geometry, tags, style, and fog. We want to modify and make a duplicate of this. So let's go play around with these styles.

So one of my favorites is under assorted is this pso graded. If you click this style you can see that it creates an almost like charcoal type drawing of this. You can also see that the sections automatically turn on so we may want to turn that off just for the sake of this kind of view.

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So I like this style so I'm going to go right click add and save as a new style. I'm going to move this over one to the right and rename this as art style one. But I want to modify this.

I feel like this image is a little bit too dark with some of this charcoal. How can I modify that in this program itself without taking it into style builder? Well to do that we can go to edit and there's you can see that there's another level of detail that we never had before. There's this line right here which which toggles the level of detail that the sketch is going to be drawing from.

All the way down it's only going to be going just it's basically going to do everything but then when you drag it all the way across you can see how much more detail is being drawn. I want to find it somewhere kind of kind of right it kind of right in between and then and then the other thing is this last one which is watermark settings. We can actually adjust these watermarks which is the the textured image in the background by clicking watermark one and clicking our settings to change this all the way down to zero.

To basically remove that one watermark and the second one we can edit this one too. We still want to leave a little bit of it but just just ever so slightly right around there and now you can already see that this is starting to look look very nice almost like an artistic drawing of the space. Now we can adjust our sky by clicking on our face settings and then clicking on our background settings and modifying sky to create a nice kind of brighter bluer sky.

The sky is a little bit too blue. I'll tone it down a little bit more on the right around there. We'll add in our ground plane which is the background maybe make that a little bit darker a little bit browner.

Excellent so I think this is a a great example of of this style. So I'm going to update this with this update the selected style as art style one and now if I was to go into my exterior view one you can see that it'll use this same style but apply that that camera location and the shadow settings with this new style. Like it may take a minute to load but what you get is a really nice kind of image with shadows and textures and this kind of artistic sketch type look.

I'm going to turn off my I'm going to go back into my um I'm going to turn off my shadows just for now. I will not update this this scene but at least that way it'll take a little bit easier to navigate. So that's art style one.

Let's create another art style. Let's go into our styles and let's let's go into style builder competition winners. You can see that there's a variety of kind of free style drawings which is kind of really fun to kind of play and export and use throughout.

Let's use this pencil sketch with darker trace lines. We'll uncheck our our sections again and here let's modify this style. Let's add a new scene for this style and we'll rename this art style two.

Let's edit this. Let's change the the face style to actually show textures and materials rather than just white and then let's add our sky and ground plane to this. We will update this style update this like this style update scene and let's go back to our exterior view one that has our shadows on to see what this looks like with shadows and now if we go into this setting right here we can actually adjust our level of detail to maybe bring that down so it's not so detailed in the windows a little more open something like that.

I think that looks a little bit better. You know you can always play around with what you think is right. I'll just leave it how it was.

Now we have these two art styles and we have our export style. So what I want to do is for our final deliverable is to export all of these scenes and each individual style export style art style one and art style two. So to do that there's no easy way to export all.

You'll need to go into art style one click exterior view one which we have right here then go to file export 2D graphic and let's go to our skp21 file downloads folder and let's create a new folder called export images and we will save our file in here. We will rename our exports to follow the same connotation as our scenes exterior view one underscore art style one. Our options we will keep our image view size this is this is going to look like the same sort of line weights and styles that our image is going to have.

If we make it larger these line styles will be a little bit thinner and it won't look the same. We'll keep it like this and then we'll export. So I've already exported all of these views and I want to show you those in a minute of what they all could look like.

This basically ends the class of everything that we learned and I think that we've created some really beautiful images. Go ahead and export at least three to five exterior views and two interior views of three different styles your base style your art style one and your art style two. Your base style you can either have the thick line weights or you can have the thin line weights.

It's really up to you what you think looks best when you export. Now let's take a look at the exported images. So I have all of the views exported in the various styles this is something that I want you guys to do as well.

If I open these up you can see the variety of looks and feels that you can get just from SketchUp. Exporting individual views really showcases the uniqueness of SketchUp. Not many 3D modeling programs give you this flexibility to create something very artistic and sketch like or something more precise that can be used as even as a construction drawing.

I hope you guys enjoyed this course. We went through a lot. We figured out how to completely model a house a clubhouse through a floor plan adding windows and doors adding in furniture and then working on the exterior with landscaping and components and various assets.

I look forward to seeing you in the class and I will talk to you later. Bye.

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