Mysteries of the Third Dimension

I love to draw, but I usually just doodle in pencil, and unless you count a few failed attempts to jazz up my résumé with fancy formatting, the last straight line I successfully drew on the computer involved the Logo turtle and an Apple II. However, I just completed my first 3-D building model in a program called Google SketchUp, which is the program used to insert 3D buildings into Google Earth, and which purports to make this sort of thing easy. It does. I just downloaded the program like an hour ago, and I’ve already made my own clumsy Romanesque chapel type thing. I normally hate online training videos, but the beginner tutorials they’ve got for this program were pretty helpful - at least the first few. After that, they went a little over my head and it was like that Troy McClure home improvement video on the Simpsons: “First, patch the cracks in the slab using a latex patching compound and a patching trowel... Now parge the lath!” Anyway, it seems like it’d be an ideal tool to create an entire Gormenghast of twisted castle architecture, but I’ll probably be lucky to end up drawing anything more complicated than a bunch of stacked crates. We’ll see.