The Don Carson Creative Blog is a place to talk about Theme Park, Computer, and Virtual World Design. This site is composed of past articles, musings, and comments from readers. Please feel free to make comments and leave me feedback.
I have wanted to try my hand at glass for the past few years. This weekend I got my chance when I took a glass bead making class at the Eugene Glass School (www.eugeneglassschool.org). I had a blast and have to be careful not to become swept away with this addictive art form. Here are a few of my first attempts. Of course, now I need to find out how to take decent pictures of these things.
For the past several years I have been using a program called SketchUp to help me pre-visualize projects I need to conceptualize. SketchUp allows me to very quickly mass together an environment, find a nice camera angle, and then print it out as an armature for my final drawing. What makes it the most powerful is that I can then hand a client a concept that is not only accurate, but to scale! Being confident that your designs are actually build-able is amazingly valuable, and with some clients I can even send them the rough SketchUp model as well. This truly does help blur the line between pure concept and production! I encourage you to check out SketchUp at www.sketchup.com, and take if for a spin.
To personalize my models even further, I have created my own hand drawn “rogues gallery” of scale people to populate my virtual environments.
My name is Don Carson and I am an illustrator and designer working in the worlds of theme park, theatrical, and computer game design. Jumping around in these disciplines has given me some unique insights into the differences and similarities of each form of entertainment. This is a forum for me to chronicle some of my random observations and lessons learned along the way.
