Ben Chandler: Build up to interim crit !!!!

Not sure where to start really, lot has happen recently so Ill start with the absolute pain of trying to find a way to do the Structural plating plan, I really wanted to hand draw it as I always have done in the past and enjoyed doing it, but soon realised that, that approach would probably not go down well, I really didnt want to have to start using CAD as I always said there is no feeling behind a line drawing drawn in it so I thought I would try Indesign, which worked really really well, until I now need to change lots of stuff, move things about and so one. Here is the Indesign attempt,

I liked it as it didn't look as generic as cad, probably because it just wasn't as clear. The next hill was my plan, I was happy with the design but as usual my hand line work wasn't the best, much improved from what it used to be like but no where near clear and crisp enough, so you can see were this is heading, so I drop my plan into Cad not having opened it for probably about a year, obviously had forgotten everything and spent an agonizing fair few hours tearing my hair out doing a teach yourself Cad re-fresher. With the help of a couple of phone calls to friends got my plan in and to scale. And thank god it has made my life so much easier in Photoshop for rendering and I actually quite enjoyed using Cad in the end so here is my before and afters .

The hand draw one!

The Cad One !!!

The line on the outside are just to make filling easier in Photoshop.

I did just forget to put up my Levels plan which I did Indesign, which was easy and will probably stay with it as me and text in Cad do not go together plus Indesign prints so much better than any other programme, Tip actually any work you do put it in to Indesign to save as you print file and the resolution its so much crisper, plus dont annotate in Photoshop as text comes out hazy, also much better in Indesign.

So here is my levels over lay, need to put the drainage on to it yet, done it in ruff so shouldnt take to long to add in, went a bit crazy with the drainage plan, I now know every single fall to every single ground plain, not needed as now I have converted some hard surfaces to timber deck, never mind.

Its got a few other things on it as I have put things on layers that they shouldn't be on.

So with the build up to the crit on its way, I descied that working the two days a week was impossible so descided to only do one, bloody glad I did now, worked for about 18 hours a day for 7 days and still not managed to get every thing finished, which was a shame as I really wanted to, but here is what I pinned up, I was really happy with my section and the way that I rendered it, just a few tweaks and then finish the other 3, the plan needs alot more work on the rendering but I was happy with the over all content of it, and my sketches are awful and need a hell of alot of work, But here they are!