Rick Blanchard Cornerstone Studios - Landscape Architect, Artist

Irrigation Plan, Rawlings Elementary School, Tustin, California

I have been using a computer since the Apple II came out. With it I built large spreadsheets for water use analysis and other things related to irrigation, my 'main bag'. I sorta fell into specializing in irrigation. My first job was to copy landscape and irrigation details by hand, because the US Navy insisted on all original drawings. Then I got the irrigation drawings because I had some engineering background and the other folks wanted to do the 'creative' work. I decided to get creative with irrigation systems. After all, in Southern California if you didn't irrigate that 'creative' idea you got the dry brown version.

My first CAD drawings were on the Apple IIe, using VersaCAD. Output was on 7.5" floppies (remember those?) in DXF format. I moved to the Mac 512 when it came out, and have been using one model or another ever since. Currently it is a G3-300. My drawings have also gone through the stages of innovation from MacDraw to MacDraft to VersaCAD. It was still a struggle though. I was using blueprint companies for output, and a 300 baud modem. Some cutting edge.

I had heard of another nice CAD program that was in use at UCLA, but it wasn't until I partnered up with my long time friend Don Wilson that I actually saw PowerCADD in action. The rest as they say, is history. Although the long wait for a good DWG translator was trying, I feel that PowerCADD and WildTools are by far the best tools for me.

The other entries here are great examples of presentations and detail work. My needs are for working drawings that are clean and easy to read, so that there are fewer questions in the field during installation. PowerCADD has allowed me to do working drawings that are much more graphically readable and what I see on the screen is what is printed. None of this color or layer nonsense to set pen widths. The clean interface of PowerCADD and the tremendous increase in productivity from WildTools is a hard combination to beat.

Rick Blanchard

Rick Blanchard

Rick Blanchard is a Landscape Architect and Senior Associate at Cornerstone Studios in Santa Ana, CA. He is a 1974 graduate in Visual Arts (Fine Arts major) from UC San Diego. He recently moved to northern New Mexico to open a branch office and plans to build an off-grid strawbale home and studio on 56 acres, plus grow some of the herbs used in an Herbal Tea business he and his wife run. Besides landscape work, Rick is a painter and printmaker, and also does some web site design. His main hobby (obsession?) is model railroads, and this has led to design and construction of museum displays and layouts and more recently, garden railroads. Email: rick@urbaneagle.com

Some of Rick's Websites

Urban Eagle     Some artwork     da Trains!

These are enlarged views of irrigation plan shown above.

Typical irrigation detail