Class materials
What do you need when you are studying garden design?
What materials do I need for garden design-based classes?
The basics that you will need are paper, grey lead pencils, an eraser, pens of varying line thickness and a scale ruler. However, there are many other items that will make your life easier or help with the process.
Session Outline
Necessary materials
Other helpful materials
Must Haves
1. Grey Lead Pencils
Any one will do to get you started. But you can get a variety of different ones ranging from soft to hard.
They are graded on a scale from B (soft) to H (hard) along with a number.
Often you can get a set with a variety of these included.
2. Paper for Sketching
You can use a lot of different papers for this. Some people like to sketch in books so that they can review them. Some people like sheets so they can file them with projects. Personally, the most common thing I use is a roll of kitchen grease proof paper as it is super cheap, slightly transparent so great for tracing and easy to tear off pieces and share and file away. Alcohol markers work quite well on it. It does start to disintegrate after a couple of years though. I use it to light my fire in the winter.
4. Scale Ruler
A scale ruler is necessary to draw real world objects at a smaller size. For garden design you want scales between 1:20 to 1:200 generally to cover most projects
3. Drafting Pens
The important thing here is that you have pens of different thickness to create a hierarchy in your drawings. At minimum, a pen around 0.1mm, 0.3mm and 0.5mm are a necessary. You can often get them in a pack of five different weights from arts and office suppliers.
Good to have but not necessary for class
Protractor and compass
Protractors will help you with angles while a compass will allow you to create circles of all sizes and triangulate where an object it.
Square
COLOURING AND RENDERING
Pens - Calligraphy pens/textas that have a chisel tip. They are great for quickly fleshing out ideas. They work really well on greaseproof paper.
Pastel pencils - Can be an easy way to render drawings with a soft finish.
Watercolours - These can be paints, pencils or textas
Alcohol markers - E.g. Copic markers
Circle Template - This can be used for drawing vegetation on planting plans quickly
Compass - This can be used for triangulating locations of elements and drawing vegetation on planting plans quickly
items that you might find in a PRACTITIONERS office
Drawing board or Desk - An angled table for drawing complete with a parallel ruler.
Graph paper - You can use graph paper to draw close to scale.
Circle template - Plastic templates with varying size circles helpful for drawing plants
Architectural templates
Flexicurve - A very handy tool for creating smooth-ish curves by manipulating the rubber
French curve - A very handy tool for creating smooth curves by hand with a curved ruler
T-Square - Used to create perpendicular lines to the side of your work bench.