The veranda

Draw a Goan veranda seen from a seat on it, looking along its length toward the garden, in ink and wash on paper, on a canvas with no image files. Do not draw it flat: describe it as a short list of solids in metres (a floor, a lime-washed wall with a teak door and a shuttered window, four square laterite pillars with a balcão seat between them, the underside of a sloping roof with rafters, a beam, a hanging brass lamp, then a hedge, a mango tree and the paddy) and look at them through one perspective camera with the eye on the horizon. Write one ray caster that finds the nearest solid for any point of the picture, and build everything from it. Trace a grid of rays once, a slice at a time, into a buffer of distance, solid and normal. Make the depth map from that buffer, one byte a pixel, white near, linear in inverse distance between one and ten units, sky zero, so it is exact and needs no depth model, and write a second map with the sky in green and the lamp in blue. Paint the wash from the same buffer: each solid’s pigment lit by the sky and by a low sun, shifted a pixel or two by slow noise so the colour drifts from the line, and laid over paper with multiply. Cast the shadows by tracing from each surface toward the sun on a small grid that you blur, so the pillars lay their shadows across the floor and up the wall. Ink the solids’ edges as hand lines that run a little past each corner, keeping only the parts the buffer says are visible, add the laterite courses, the floor joints, the rafters and the louvres as lighter lines, and hatch where the light is away. Hang the lamp on its chain apart from the rest so it can swing. In warm, the lamp sways and a little dust drifts in the light. In playful, the pointer moves the sun across the garden and the shadows sweep the floor. In a dark theme, make it dusk with the lamp lit. Quiet is a hairline drawing of the same edges with nothing moving.