Where is everyone?

360 degree pics of Newington Gardens and Dickens Square. Borough High Street was packed, but the survey area was almost completely empty thoroughout both of my visits. In London! How to get people to use the parks? Hmmm. To be continued...

Métis, or the Hairy Caterpillar Conundrum

My finished Metis sheets (at last!) above. I was happy with the idea, and thought for about 5 minutes that it might actually turn out alright - but I'm not particularly pleased with the way the project looks. I find it childish and old fashioned, especially after seeing some of the Photoshop work other people produced. The process threw up a few issues:

"Drawing the same hairy caterpillar over and over again and expecting different results" - a new definition of insanity. I tried so hard to draw lovely light wavy planting, using inks, paints, graphite powder, pens etc, and wasted hours on sheets and sheets of the same hairy caterpillars where I was hoping to produce beautiful flowing planting beds. Rendering them in caterpillar green probably didn't help either...

Perspectives and elevations - perspective drawing is difficult. I'm not sure if my elevation is in fact a section, or elevation, or just an abomination! 

Photoshop montaging and Sketchup - I didn't know I was wary of these and did make a basic Sketchup model, but seem to have stuck mainly with hand drawing, despite my limited skills there too. Will force myself to join the modern world next time. Which brings me to...

3D modelling - I wish I'd made some better sketch models which I could have photographed properly and perhaps used in Photoshop. I made models for the first two incarnations, which did help, but the second one was literally made from balls of newspaper and wasn't much good photo-wise. It's also really hard to demonstrate soft, partially transparent planting in sketch model form! I'm only going to design very solid hedging from now on...

Technology - irritating, boring, nitty gritty things take too much time and make life miserable. For example...making multi-page pdfs (or rather, accessing the technology which allows this); difficulties accessing scanners A3 and above; shrinking pdfs to an appropriate size - still not sure I did this right, and the caterpillars really don't need to be more blurry! Also discovered the colour on my computer seems to be different to all other computers; my images look really washed out on other screens and printed much paler too - but how can I ever know what colour things are going to be if my screen is wrong? Argh!

Plus the actual design process of course...oh dear.

Splatter patterns

Bleurgh!! Paint splatters transformed into a pattern applied with the bucket tool in Photoshop. I had no idea about this useful technique before the task, and will probably use it again...with different colours.

Garden bridge

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/01/uk-garden-bridge-150m-thames-south-bank-soho
An interesting idea (even if the comments are as sour as ever...). Have to say, "the only sounds will be birdsong" is definitely on the optimistic side though! I wonder if it'll ever actually get built?

Dynamic composition: the return

Here's the new version, after being given 10 minutes to improve it - I tried to simplify the layout to decrease the mess factor and hopefully add/retain some kind of visual hierarchy. Glad the original was judged to have some dynamism at least though!

Warning! One ancient laptop was harmed during the making of this file...

My go at a quick A1 dynamic composition, using last week's photomontages.

My original images were not particularly dynamic, so I cut them and warped them and fiddled with colour and light, using the pics as abstract shapes rather than displaying each image properly. Unfortunately I find the finished product messy and unsophisticated.

Laying this out tested my poor old laptop as much as my (lack of) Photoshop skills. I lacked the RAM to use certain effects, resizing etc took forever and I could have cooked my tea in the time it took to save the psd file. Frustrating! And something to bear in mind.

Mind mapping

We did some group mind mapping in class yesterday, culminating in a quick 10-minute design. I can see how this method can help throw up lots of avenues of thought you might never otherwise come up with, meaning more design ideas can be explored.

Coming up with the mind maps was straightforward enough, but I found turning the concepts into a design really difficult. My brain feels like it's stuck in buffering mode when I try to do this and the design was already half-done by nimbler thinkers by the time I'd worked out how to start! Bit depressing - hopefully this is something that will come in (not too much) time...

I'll try the mapping technique again, anyway.