ABSTRACT
As designers of the built environment, we are tasked with how to provide innovative and creative design solutions for a given environment. Coming up with great ideas can often be a challenge. And, once we arrive with plausible concepts, ideas most likely will fall short, if they are not conveyed in a visually compelling and informative manner. Consequently, we may risk losing the interest of the reader. Representing Landscapes: Digital is a publication celebrating an array of visual representations of various landscapes created by students in landscape architecture programs across the globe, using digital means. is publication is meant to be both instructional and inspirational for students at all college/university levels and for instructors and professionals alike. As students and designers of the built environment, we tend to look at a collection of landscape graphics books as a resource to help us visually communicate our ideas and to learn a visual vocabulary to depict our concepts. From Grant Reid’s or Francis Ching’s classic instructional books or the loose yet evocative sketches and techniques offered by Mike Lin, these kinds of books have provided such a wealth of resource with regard to drawing techniques and tips on how to draw the concept via specific drawing types. Hand graphic skills, though becoming a lost art, are still an important skill to acquire, since they are a good way to quickly sketch ideas and start the process of a digital drawing. Landscape architects are becoming much more dependent on skill sets focusing on communication of ideas processed and generated via software programs. More and more, styles and techniques that were often composed by unique pencil or brush strokes and media such as watercolor, graphite, or pen and ink are now often replaced by a combination of features within specific software programs to help compose a specific quality for the drawing. Over the years of teaching studios and visual representation courses, the one issue that has remained constant is students’ desire and inquiry to “see” and “understand” the graphic language to best communicate their idea.
