Mount Pleasant Cemetery

This is a smaller project that I did while I was waiting for the Toronto Archives to open again (it has been closed indefinitely since the pandemic). This isn’t really a neo-gothic design, but it’s a nice looking gate and it’s near where I live. I was able to take a good picture from across the street and analyze the geometry. It turned out that it was based on a root-3 rectangle (a rectangle where the ratio of the short side to the long side is 1:1.732). This type of geometry lends itself to equilateral triangles and therefore hexagrams (and therefore hexagons) and the angles are 30, 60 and 90 degrees.

As an example of how this geometry works in terms of proportion, I’ve included below an image of a hexagon set to the width of the portal. You can see that when this is extrapolated to a hexagram (6 pointed star, like the star of David) then the extents of that hexagram indicate both the height and the width of the overall main centre part of the gate. The red rectangle is a root-3 rectangle.

I used this main root-3 rectangle to find all of the other proportions. The geometric underlay that I came up with is shown below.

After this, I started the rendering. I drew it on an 18″x24″ page, which allowed me to scale it with the actual number of bricks. Here is a progress picture of the rendering process.

Basically from here it was just finishing the rendering an adding shadows. Here is the final image: