In my search for a bird’s eye views of road and freeway networks, I found an image that was of the Varsity Lake Interchange in Michigan. I wanted to sketch this image because of the bridge that is shown going over a freeway. Also, because it exemplifies a perpendicular road and freeway network as a composition, which gives the viewer a sense of strength, continuity, interconnectivity, and structure.
This depiction of a road network is comparable to arteries and veins in living, breathing organisms; it can also be seen in natural earthly formations, such as rivers and streams. Rivers and streams, however, are usually not angular and perpendicular to one another. They’re more organic and curvilinear, being networks of flowing water. I suppose if traffic were constantly flowing, then the structures for traffic to move on would be more similar to that of the flowing networks of nature.
Anyhow, as I introduced in the first paragraph, this image is a combination of a sketch and a digital image obtained off of the internet. I sketched the Varsity Lake Interchange with pencil, and then I scanned it on to a computer. I wanted to have some bleed through of the original image that I used as the source to make the sketch, so I applied some of selection techniques in my editing program. It’s like the two sources are interpolated and bridged together further by altering the sharpness as well as the colors after merging the two images.
The main ideas communicated here are: Structure, continuity, interconnectivity, travel, bridging, and, of course, work, or energy.
Art of eVan 