How to create a concept project with Inkscape

beginner friendly

Concept projects are the best! And the worst. Mostly because the lengths you should go are always pretty vague. How much work is enough to present your ideas for a space or a building? And how do you define the checkpoint where you should stop? No one really knows.

Initial plot drawing.

When this landed on my desk I got very anxious. A plot at Ikaria and the owner’s vision for a multipurpose space for the summer. A restaurant, a coffee shop, a small theater and a couple of other activities, mostly appealing to tourists and visitors. The input was a .dwg file with a few altitude measurements here and there, coordinates and photos depicting the surroundings. What am I supposed to do with this information? I wondered and kept avoiding the task for a few days. My brain did a lot of back-end work until I felt ready to actually do something. Let’s go.

1. Get to know the requirements

Fortunately our client was pretty clear about the uses he desired to accommodate. All I had to do here was to decide the best way to depict this. Since I only had a plan of the plot, I decided to go with that. I would create a plan view, almost from scratch. I also did some research on the uses and the building regulations to have a more complete overview.

2. Create a background

I went with maps that I could find online. Using the coordinates I managed to pinpoint the location. I took a screenshot of the spot. And that’s all for this step.

3. GIMP time

Because I didn’t like the colors and all those details, I imported the image in the GIMP and played around with the saturation. I also dragged the image curves to darken some areas and highlight others. Last modification was to go to Filters > Artistic > Oilify… This blended the colors a bit and blurred the image to the point that it resembled an oil painting. This is the result: