Simeon Jackson

Adobe Photoshop skills are useful in many modern professions, whether or not they are directly based around graphic design.  My own proficiency with the program has grown out of a keen interest in graphic design, fantasy art and computing.

This series of images were created to demonstrate the lighting characteristics of a few spaces in the building that my group and I designed for a studio project at Penn State University.  The project brief was to design a “Signature” building for the College of Engineering and therefore they wanted spaces which would speak out engineering, sustainable concepts and would include natural daylighting.

This image is of the atrium, which is filled with light via windows (behind viewer) as well as a glass roof.  Although the glass roof would use a low T-viz glass, as not to let in too much solar glare, there would still be enough sunlight in this space to make it feel very open and airy.  The windows to each side let this light into the spaces of the building, such as offices and classrooms.

I originally drew a sketch of the space, scanned it in and then put all the colour and other features in photoshop.  Notice that I use a reflection of the centre of the image in the glass to each side.

This is an image of one of the classrooms.  It was made to show the sawtooth roof technique which we were proposing for this area. Again developed from a scanned sketch, the chairs were coloured and duplicated from front to back.  A photo was added to be seen through the windows.  The walls and ceiling were plain colours which I added gradient effects to to give the sensation of light.  The gradients are carefully chosen to be where light would actually fall, and highlights were added to the chairs and floor in the same way.

This image of the office was rather rushed, although it has some really nice touches in it, so I thought I would keep it in here anyway.  Again, I tried to make the walls light and dark where light would actually fall and am particularly proud of how the drawing board turned out.  Although it looks rather cartoony, the lighting effects look realistic!  The chairs were my own conception, but the lighting is taken directly from a Louis Poulsen Design.

I did all of the images in a night (literally a night, mostly between the hours of midnight and 5 O’clock!), whilst doing other small tasks at the same time, so each one must have taken between an hour and an hour and a half.