Unit 03 Concept Visualization: Composite planting plan

This part of Unit 03 was also quite enjoyable. It helped me to better understand the process involved with creating a digital plan of a design. To start off, I first opened up Google Earth to retrieve an image of a site. For this exercise, I used the grassy area between Noyer and the Whitinger Business Building. I saved the image to my computer and then opened it up in Photoshop. Once in Photoshop, I cropped out the Google logo and the Street View/ Zoom tools from the image. I then duplicated the layer and went to work on creating a planting plan. I desaturated this layer and began to map out paths and connection points using the Line Tool. Using the lines created with the Line Tool as a guide, I used the Polygon Lasso Tool to crop out areas I wanted to become grassy areas. Next, I found an image of grass from Google Images and pasted it into my planting plan to represent the new grassy areas of my design. I placed this grass layer between the duplicated Google Earth layer and the background so that the grass would show through the holes that I had created using the Polygon Lasso Tool. Once this was complete, I put in the paths. I created a new layer for the pathways, then using the Polygon Lasso Tool, I traced the guide line that I had created earlier. Once this was done, I colorized the selected areas using the Paint Bucket Tool.
Once the ground-plane elements were in place, I added trees and scale figures to the plan. I used the Ellipse Tool and trees on the Google Earth image (to get an scale of how large they should be) to create circles that would represent tree. Once the circle had been formed, I added color to it using the Paint Bucket Tool and then lowered the opacity. Next I used the Fx feature to add an inner shadow to the trees. I felt that this gave them a greater sense of dept. Also in the Fx feature, I added a "dropped shadow" to the trees to also give them a sense of depth as well. Once the trees were completed, I used the same process to create scale figures.