Morpholio honored one of Mike’s master plan sketches in their top ten this month. He’s the only landscape architect awarded, sharing the glory with architects, illustrators and industrial designers. This is his first award for the craft of illustrating a design rather than the design itself.
The sketch is a detail of a master plan, rotated and cropped. There are a lot of hidden layers, shown in gray on the right side of the image. Some were intermediate steps, another is ruled lines to guide the text, keeping it a uniform size and horizontal.
Setting up the drawing
Building a sketch starts from a scaled site plan. The design forms on a succession of new layers, much like we used tracing paper back in the day, but without the pile of rejected ideas and paper waster.
Once the design’s considered useable, a color layer set to multiply does base colors, another plants, another textures. Doing things this way makes editing easier.
Learning curve
I should mention that it took months of practice and lots of mistakes to figure out this workflow, and more to get to where the plans started looking good.
Annette is starting out with Trace, experiencing the same issues and learning curve. Since she already knows how to draw and design, the hardest part is behind her.