Designing a fantasy garden

 

For our first design project we were tasked with creating a fantasy garden based on a randomly allocated brief. Briefs were created by each person writing down their favourite colour, favourite music genre, a celebrity and a location. These then made up the brief we had to design to. 

My brief was as follows:

Celebrity- Alex Turner (songwriter for the Artic Monkeys)

Colour- Sea blue 

Music Genre- Ambient

Place- Findochty (A small coastal town in Scotland)

I knew from the beginning that I wanted this fantasy garden to have a water element, seeing as the colour I was allocated was sea blue and Findochty is also a coastal town. Within the brief I decided that I would design this as if Alex Turner was my client and I was creating a peaceful oasis for him to escape to to create music. 

This therefore, lead me to start brainstorming and creating mood boards based on the above. 

This first mood board is based on the concept of having a very ambient treehouse above a lake. I liked the idea of a treehouse because it mimics the height that the houses in Findochty sit at, this also creates a sense of seclusion that would allow Turner to create music and write in peace. Within the tree house there would be very warm cosy lighting contrast the dark and moody planting on the outside, creating a very ambient atmosphere. This treehouse would sit above a lake, bodies of water are known for being very calming adding to the ambient atmosphere, this also links to the brief colour of sea blue. In terms of planting I really like the idea of very whimsical planting mixed among very dark purples and greens to create depth and a sense of fairytale like environment. Below are some of my initial design ideas. 

After drawing up my designs I thought it would be useful to work in photoshop and render the design I had in mind, this is useful because it allows me to display, in a way that is accessible to all, my thoughts and the emotions I want to portray through this design, this also allows me to begin thinking about planting and structure, that I am less able to represent through my own drawings.

 

    

When photoshopping I decided to try out two different backgrounds to see how this altered the overall mood of my idea presentation. I much prefer the design on the left as I feel it is much truer to the emotion I am trying to portray and the solace that one would find cosy inside in a landscape such as this, creating a landscape that provoked such emotion was my overall aim. 

Following on from this I will now begin to make a model to represent this idea to scale, and so that aspects can be seen from all directions.