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.
