Trevor Ehlers

Anyway we can get some quick sketch technique (marker, colored pencil, pastel etc) and rendering tutorials on here ?

tim-

you bring up a good point..atmosphere is difficult to convey in hand drawn work. all I can think of at the moment is airbrush..

anyone know the best way to convey “god rays” in drawn perspectives? thanks

Ashley- In urban settings, supplemental irrigation is advantageous for the summer-dry months. Specifically, I’ve used inline subsurface drip. Quality growing medium like compost is important too, along with mycorrhizal fungi applications to help plants thrive through root establishment. Some native plant material I have used are: Juncus…[Read more]

does anyone know how rain gardens thrive in the Bay Area? I am wondering because right now, its the rainy season, so everything is getting a lot of water – but when it is summer and dry, how do the plants in the rain garden get their water? What plants do you suggest putting in the rain garden?

Hello all
For those of you in the San Fran Bay Area registration for the tour of East Bay native plant gardens just opened. Went last year, will go again this year. http://www.BringingBacktheNatives.net

Semiarundaria fastuosum is a good screen variety. Dense and upright.

Hi James,
Actually, my professor introduced me to your work this past summer, my first semester in LA, and it was he who let me know about your rendering techniques and color usage. In fact, our first shot at perspectives involved 20 minute perspective-making sessions that aimed to emulate your graphics.
I could only hope that if he hadn’t told…[Read more]

Hi Vanessa; glad you’re having success with the colored pencil techniques. You have a good eye! I do use a cream pencil combined with peach on almost all buildings and hardscape at the very beginning of coloring a drawing, then wash over them with whatever color will best depict the material I’m envisioning…terra cotta, slate blue. etc. The…[Read more]

Nick,
Thanks! I’ll probably be doing more of these in the future and I would like to seed them be as representative of the true design as possible.

Thanks!

Eric-

I got your message. I need to make some evergreens for a plan tomorrow as fate would have it. I’ll post my steps here or shoot you a message.

-Nick

Eric,

I couldn’t tell you how to do it using drop shadows, but I could offer some good advice on doing it manually in photoshop without creating numerous layer copies and keeping the file size down.

send me a message if you still need help with this and I’ll explain some simple tricks.

Does anyone have good method for doing evergreen shadows in photoshop with the drop shadow?

Well said Mark, our proffesion is so variable that it makes it easy for others to put us in a box on one side of it which I find to be simply ‘lanscaping’. We need to work together as a profession to be “armed with facts and calculations” to give creditability to the profession across the board.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This issue is complicated and to say that rain gardens are the answer is not much different than the traditional infrastructure approach, where one solution can solve all problems. In most instances and geographic locations, the solution needs to include water quality and quantity solutions to solve the problem. Rain gardens, bio-swales and…[Read more]

Charles,

“Blame it on the Rain” – Milli Vanilli

Well, not really. I just wanted to quote them! Policy is a difficult thing. Until every land owner is charged by the city for the real cost of thier stormwater impacts from a pre development hydrology, there will be uncecesary systems put ini place.
The cool thing about rain gardens is that for…[Read more]

Cole

Good comments. It is annoying to listen to disciples of the “new” green movement who lack the understanding necessary to design facilities that actually work and can be maintained (sustained). Even here in the NW we have LID facilities being required in locations where they just will not work.

Robin, not to be a sceptic: I have recently moved to hawaii though spent the last 5 years in the califonia working for a large engineering firm. It is difficult to get buy in from the engineers as the systems are simply not as functional there as they are in the NW. The reason for this is that the NW has rain year round whereas cali has no rain…[Read more]

James Richards is great. I love his simple color palette. He blends darker colors in his lighter colors to make things look cohesive. For instance, he used carmine red and true blue (i think it was true blue) prismacolor color pencils over cream to create this really nice effect. So, the cream hardscape and buildings really popped after i tried to…[Read more]

….and a nicely planted raingarden, or artful rainwater catchment system usually looks better, provided it works correctly, than the typical curb and gutter system. I have found that the client is usally into this aspect of LID. In residential applications, is it wonderful if they take ownership of the process and work to make regulatory change…[Read more]