Digital Drawing for Landscape Architecture

Contemporary Techniques and Tools for Digital Representation in Site Design

Bradley Cantrell, Wes Michaels

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118693186
• eBook ISBN: 9781118938911
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Combine traditional techniques with modern media for more communicative renderings

Digital Drawing for Landscape Architecture: Contemporary Techniques and Tools for Digital Representation in Site Design, Second Edition bridges the gap between traditional analog and new digital tools by applying timeless concepts of representation to enhance design work in digital media. The book explores specific techniques for creating landscape designs, including digitally rendered plans, perspectives, and diagrams, and the updated second edition offers expanded coverage of newer concepts and techniques. Readers will gain insight into the roles of different drawings, with a clear emphasis on presenting a solid understanding of how diagram, plan, section, elevation, and perspective work together to present a comprehensive design approach.

Digital rendering is faster, more efficient, and more flexible than traditional rendering techniques, but the design principles and elements involved are still grounded in hand-rendering techniques. Digital Drawing for Landscape Architecture exploits both modalities to help designers create more beautiful, accurate, and communicative drawings in a professional studio environment. This second edition contains revised information on plan rendering techniques, camera matching workflow, and color selection, along with brand new features, like:

• Time-based imagery and tools
• Workflow integration techniques
• Photoshop and Illustrator task automation
• Over 400 updated images, plus over 50 new examples of award-winning work

The book takes a tutorial-based approach to digital rendering, allowing readers to start practicing immediately and get up to speed quickly. Communication is a vital, but often overlooked component of the design process, and designers rely upon their drawings to translate concepts from idea to plan. Digital Drawing for Landscape Architecture provides the guidance landscape designers need to create their most communicative renderings yet.

Part 1
Concepts

Chapter 1
Introduction/Overview

Digital Drawing for Landscape Architecture: Contemporary Techniques and Tools for Digital Representation in Site Design provides professionals and students with a clear guide to understanding the digital representation process for a variety of design drawings. Each chapter highlights a specific technique by examining its role in the digital media and landscape representation process through methods available in current software. This provides the reader with tangible tools to explore digital media in the creation of design drawings.

The professions of landscape architecture and urban planning have a strong tradition of representation that has evolved with the professions. During the last hundred years, this has been dominated by analog representation—primarily pencil (graphite), pen (ink), markers (pigment), and watercolor (pigment). The aforementioned analog representation techniques have focused on creating a variety of design drawings such as functional and operational diagrams, orthographic plans, section/elevations, isometrics, and perspective renderings.

The content in this book intends to bridge a fundamental gap between the analog and digital tools used to represent landscape architecture and urban planning projects. The gap has formed in representation methods with the introduction of digital tools that have been adopted despite a generation of designers who are versed in analog methods. Digital Drawing for Landscape Architecture aims to fill this gap by pulling from the methods of analog representation and applying these concepts to digital media. Examining individual working methods and applying the content of this book to enhance the current design and representation processes are essential to this goal.

A misnomer that many designers intend to embrace when moving to digital representation methods is that the past can be left behind; nothing could be further from the truth. Knowledge of analog representation plays a vital role in understanding the application of digital tools and techniques. Tools such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop are born directly from analog processes and tools defined by their physical counterparts. The Paint Bucket tool is used to pour paint into areas, and the PaintBrush tool applies paint to a virtual canvas. This language is intentional and builds on our current knowledge of illustration, avoiding the creation of a new digital tool that has no context in the physical world. It would be confusing and the learning curve would be that much steeper if the Photoshop Paint Brush tool was called the Pixel Application tool and the canvas was called the pixel grid.

Figure 1.1. Delta scale lobe building visualization.

LSU Coastal Sustainability Studio, Ian Miller, MLA 2014, Louisiana State University Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture

The connections between analog and digital modes go beyond naming conventions into techniques and processes. Current digital rendering processes vary greatly between individuals and firms, as well as across a range of software. It is commonly said that there are an infinite variety of ways to accomplish the same task in image- or vector-editing software. The versatility of most software packages comes from the variety of tools and the options for combining those tools to complete a specific task. This versatility allows the software to be used across a variety of professions from photography to technical illustration. Because of the depth and versatility of the software, the learning curve is typically steep for new users. Similar to using a pencil and pen, there is no way to automatically generate a section, plan, or elevation. Instead, a combination of tools and methods come together through a proven process to generate the desired results. Digital media provides efficiencies in some areas but does not provide a shortcut to learning the fundamentals of drawing and illustration.

Figure 1.2. Master plan for San Juan Island.

Joshua Brooks, BLA 2012, Louisiana State University Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture

Understanding the fundamentals of drawing is essential, but it is not exclusive to either medium. The contemporary design world fully embraces both mediums as valid methods to represent projects and explore design ideas. It is possible to understand the fundamentals of composition, lineweight, texture, color, and/or atmosphere with a pencil or with Photoshop. The physical processes may be different, but conceptually the rules and ideas are similar.

Conceptually, each designer must embrace digital media as a tool with analytic, performative, and representational possibilities. Many designers view the computer as a rival that must be conquered in order to accomplish each task. It is important to reverse that role. In order to do this, the designer should have a general understanding of how a computer and operating system function. This environment of hardware and software is where most processes occur; therefore, taking the time to become familiar with your surroundings is very useful. Typically, this is a low priority for designers; we are not computer engineers and, therefore, we often overlook or even overcomplicate basic hardware and software functions.

Figure 1.3. Atchafalaya Basin section perspective.

Joshua Brooks, Kim Nguyen, Devon Boutte, Martin Moser, Responsive Systems Studio, Fall 2011, Louisiana State University Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture

Software

Software typically describes code or computer programs that perform a specific task within a computer system. Although there are many types of software, designers are typically concerned with specific types of applications for pixel/raster editing, vector editing, three-dimensional modeling, and video/motion graphics editing. Each type of application plays a different role in the representation process but also interacts with and utilizes the hardware in different ways. Beyond applications, it is also important to understand the role of the operating system because it is at the core of any hardware/software relationship.

Operating System

The operating system handles the intricacies of the interaction between the user and the hardware. Generally, nearly all of the computing devices we use from desktop computers to video game consoles use some type of operating system that we interact with using a graphical user interface (GUI). The two prominent operating systems for design professionals are Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X. For architects and landscape architect...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: Concepts
• Part 2: Workflows
• Part 3: Design Diagrams
• Part 4: Plan/Section Renderings
• Part 5: Perspectives
• Bibliography
• Index
• End-User License Agreement