Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Let's get this started:

As I promised, new posts with my school assignments and projects.

To start off, we did a project that was a simple 2D piece of art work. I apologize, I don't have a finished image of this, because my professor took mine (they are required to keep original projects of a few students in order to keep the program's certification, but the finished product was black ink for the swirls, and the circles were yellow- tea-dyed construction paper. Our assignment was to use five paint names that we were assigned and come up with a composition that reflected what we thought they meant and would appear like. To be honest, I can't remember all of the colors I was assigned, the yellow was frontier days, the black was Diva, the blue was Morning Haze, and I can't remember what the gray or the green were but the black stuck out a lot showing that diva's make things all about themselves and need to be the center of attention.
The next few assignments required little to no creativity and were strictly practicing line weight and letter techniques.

This assignment was straight copying another sheet of paper. We put the trace over the drawings and copied everything. I found that I should have made the objects in the front (for the picture on the left) a bit darker, so that it would read better. The wall-lines in the left picture should have been made much darker as well. But as everything, we learn as we go.
We also had one assignment to practice lettering. In landscape architecture, all writing is put in capitals. This makes it easier for others to read, and it also ensures that all letters are the same height.

To do this, we use a T-square and an ames lettering guide to layout the heights of the letters.
We are allowed to create our own style letters which is fun, but it's also more challenging than it sounds.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

It's been a long time

I have decided to focus this blog to something more relevant in my life. I am currently attending UW- Madison in hopes of pursuing Landscape Architecture as a professional degree. It's proven to be quite the challenge and can be very intimidating at times with the thought in my mind that the program will only take the top 23 applicants (there should be over 50 applying). I have already seen an improvement in my work, but as I improve so do my classmates. Fortunately, many students are realizing after a semester in the program, that this is not for them.

I have decided to focus my blog on becoming a landscape architect. I will be posting my projects here and discussing the process. As my professor had told our class on our first day, many students have no idea what landscape architecture is or what it entails. My goal is to help everyone understand everything about this career.

While, I am in the midst of final projects being due for the semester, I may not be able to post projects up until after Christmas.


I also have taken interest in part of my job as many have become interested in in the last few decades- "GOING GREEN". In my lectures I've been given a few websites with green design, some of which are completely ridiculous and not aesthetically pleasing at all, but others are logical as well as beautiful and I hope to share those as I come across them.

Just so I can post something, here is one my professor showed me on friday.
Patrick Blanc has beautiful designs for his green walls that can make going green more artistic and interesting. It also reminds me of all of my mom's friend's quilts.