This video was one I recently shared to a group. It’s the method I use for outdoor lighting in terms of planning out schemes for both Uplighting and dark skies compliant lighting schemes. Hopefully, it helps you in terms of future lighting designs. The key can be found here:
https://hudsonlighting.co.uk/drawing-symbols-af.php
Simple dark skies rules:
1# No upward illumination
2# 2700K or warmer
3# No illumination near waterways or hedgerows allowing for a buffer zone free of light
4# Use the lights only where necessary, not just because you have them
5# Use low output as possible, 1W and even dimming may be needed
Hello to you wonderful garden design professionals today I want to talk to you about doing lighting drawings and about how I do them now full disclosure I’m only doing this from a plan I can see I don’t have a full view of the entire picture of the garden and how
It’s actually going to mature later on so I can only base the information I’m providing in terms of of the lighting design on this on what I can see and as a garden designer you’re going to have a much better idea about what’s actually going to happen with the garden and
Therefore probably have better lighting decisions to make so I’ve been provided this amazing plan from Lucy bravington she kindly provided to me ages ago and we did a design that was implemented and this plan she allowed me to use for educational purposes so I get to share
That with you now on this plan you can actually see that there are some feature trees we’ve got some Aces with underlying planting going on you can you can see that there’s a couple of different height changes there’s also a Riverway that runs across the top of the
Garden we’ve got a paved foot paath area going around the entirety of the garden and we’ve got two important seating areas as well as some steps leading down to the pathway too so I’m going to show you a uplighting scheme and a dark skies friendly scheme we’ll talk about the two
Differences in a moment so when I’m planning out for a uplighting scheme what I do is the first thing is I create different layers so I use illustrator for my lighting overlays and if you’d like a tutorial on how I do that just let me know in the comments below and
I’ll be happy to do that so in illustrator what I do is I bring in our lighting key now this lighting key was a collaborative project and still is a collaborative project I set out a standard of symbols using the international symbol Library I was a little bit struggling with some of the
You know sometimes we get a plan from a designer and it would be all these random colored spots sometimes it would be a much more professional plan but it was still difficult to determine the difference between different symbols sometimes the symbols were so close together that you could easily make a
Mistake and think that one light was you know type A and actually it was type B and so I thought well I could do something better so I devised the symbol set initially and then I had input from lighting designers theater designers garden design everyone has in inputed
Into this and so it’s all been adjusted and amended as we’ve gone on and we’re finding more and more uptake of it and it’s not tied to our products at all it’s literally in fact in this key that we can actually see on here is actually a bunch of different brands of products
On there so I encourage you to try and use that key in future so I bring this key in on a separate layer so the first step that I take when I’m doing an overlay for garden lighting plan is I look at the features in the garden what are the features so
The features typically are trees sculptures water there’s probably a few others that are missing there I’m sure you I’m sure you can name a few below so in this particular plan I’ve firstly picked out the trees we’ve got the the aces around the borders and the main sections of the planting and we’ve
Also got this huge mature tree that’s just slightly off to the left of center as well and what I’ve chosen to do is provide Spike lighting illumination up lighting underneath each of the feature trees and in the cases where the trees say on the bottom
Here we’ve got two views of the tree I.E we can view the back side and the front side of the tree I’ve illuminated it from both sides so that’s the first step that I do is I place those symbols down for those features the next thing I do
Is I look at safety and navigation so what do I mean I mean how am I going to get around the garden and see and importantly are there any anywhere that I might trip or fall or anything like that so firstly I look at the steps and
I go okay I’m going to put some eyelids on the steps because they’re nice and friendly to the eye they illuminate really well across the Treads of the steps so because of the scale of this particular plan I’ve just literally just put three symbols down but I’ve put a
Note at the bottom saying eyelids both sides one across every two steps because you can straddle eyelids across not you don’t have to have one eyelid per step you can straddle it across two you can do alternating you can do all sorts of different things depending on kind of
The design aesthetic that you want so that’s the first thing so that we can safely navigate down those steps and then secondly I put downward Spike spots around the pathway so that we can navigate around the pathway whilst also creating a feature of that pathway too
Oh I’ve missed two features so the two Fe two further features to illuminate were actually the the seating areas so over the bench seating top left just up here we have a pendant light a lunar pendant hanging from a tree branch and just Illuminating over that bench
Seating because we can do that that’s amazing it produces a brilliant effect and is nice down lighting and then for the bench seating area that’s faced towards the Riverway now both of them are face towards the Riverway but the bench seating area on the right hand side with the
Fireball I’ve just used downward Spike spots behind the seating why behind and why not in front well because I don’t want to ruin the view of someone actually sitting there and trying to view the Riverway so I chose to put the lighting behind the seating so it
Illuminates really The Backs side of the seating under the seating and around that area and allows you to navigate and use it and you know be able to see if You’ got a cup of te a cup of coffee or a glass of wine there you can you know
You’ll still be able to you know do everything that you want to but you’re not spoiling the view of the Riverway now I did do one further thing on this particular plan although this was never actually implemented and I’m not really a fan of it but sometimes the clients
Want what the clients want and in this particular case we thought that there was a possibility if they wanted the huge mature tree illuminated what you might do is you might place a even a spike spot in this case I placed a spike spot under the slope laor to illuminate
The trunk you could use um a recessed inser light in the grass so that you can mow straight over it something like that um to illuminate the trunk and then two further lights so there’s one here on the right hand side and one at the bottom left hand side to illuminate the
Canopy and try and give you an even effect depend whether or not it’s either winter and we’re looking at just bare stem trunk and all the limbs or it’s spring summer when we’ve got a full foliage full leaves going on there I personally think it’s very unwi Wildlife
Friendly but sometimes clients really do want that level of Illumination so let’s have a look at a dark skies plan and how that differs okay so this is the Dark Skies plan and as you can see it’s very much cut back versus the uplighting scheme we’ve got
Less than half the amount of lighting this would be the one that I would really recommend the client now I think the first thing you’re going to notice is that actually there’s no Illumination in the second half and you’re probably asking why is there no Illumination in
The second half and the reason being is that because we’ve got that Riverway on the top of the plan to be a dark skies compliant lighting scheme we need to avoid any illumination near any waterways and so that’s where the bats and other Wildlife will be navigating
Flying hunting and everything else so we don’t want to disturb that so we’re going to bring the lighting back and fade that off towards that area so I’ve chosen in this particular scheme not to illuminate anywhere near that second half in the first half I’ve picked out
The features again I’ve gone okay let’s pick out the the the feature trees closer to the house and I’ve illuminated at the moment I just did just one side I did just the the pathway side you could illuminate both sides if you really wanted to you don’t necessarily need to
We’re down lighting so we’re placing a trap M strap mounted tree light actually in the tree we’re downward Illuminating and we’re going to luminate the lower trunk we C that height at 2 m again because of bat’s height um flying height so we don’t want to disturb they they
Tend to fly about 2 m high so if we cap that uh lighting about 2 m High then we don’t tend to impact their their flying habits so we’re downward Illuminating and we’re Illuminating all of the lower planting so we’re changing the whole look of the scheme we’re bringing out
And highlighting what’s going on at the bottom rather than the top it’s just a really different way of looking at it and then we’re doing the same with the planting as well so now we’ve gone okay we’re going to make the lower planting the feature so we’re using planting
Lights around the close to the path area and also within the planting so we’re just providing just a little bit of Illumination just to navigate that pathway but we’re also just picking out the features of the of the blower planting itself and then we’ve put we’ve still got the eyelids and the steps
Eyelids are perfectly Dark Skies friendly type fittings and we really do need to make sure that we illuminate steps because you know it’s as I say it’s a potential safety issue and the thing that I’d be advising the client here is that we only want to turn this
Lighting on when we go out to actually use the garden we’re not going to turn this Lighting on just because it’s dark we’re only doing it when we go out and use it so hopefully that helps you understand the two differences between uh an uplighting plan and a dark skies
Plan and I hope that I can encourage you to do more Dark Skies plans