Last week I was in Alberta for meetings in Calgary, Edmonton and points in between. I made a quick side trip to Drumheller, mainly out of curiosity. I hadn’t been there since our kids were little, more than 40 years ago. Things had obviously changed a great deal, but one thing was obvious to me. As a designer and builder of mini golf courses, I saw the town as the perfect place to build such a facility. There were plenty of hotels and tourist businesses. A quick internet search informed me there are more than a million visitors annually, with young families being the main demographic. My visit prompted me to search through my stored files for a concept drawing created a quarter century ago for just such a project. We don’t have the bandwidth to expand our operation to include such a venture, but if someone out there does, we would love to design and build it for them.
Prize creation
While going through old files and concepts from years ago, I came across one of the most unusual and fun ones. The drawing was for a snow ‘toboggan’ that was built and used to enter a race down a ski hill in Edmonton. We were working at West Edmonton Mall, building the new Galaxyland at the time, and they asked us to partner with them in a charity fundraising event. We designed and fabricated the ‘snow machine’ and brought it to the event. The officials ultimately determined ot was too dangerous to race alongside other entries. But we did receive a trophy for the most creative entry. Our team also got one solo demonstration run, which was smooth and fast. The hardest part of the whole operation was dragging this monstrosity back up the hill and onto the truck after the event.
First computer
As I am going through my old CDs and transferring them to my computer, I am finding lots of old treasures.
In 1998, we purchased our first computer to create my concept drawings. The computer was a custom-built machine, the most powerful at the time. We also purchased a flatbed scanner, a printer, a digital drawing pad and the latest graphics programs. The salesperson told me the machine was insanely fast and that I most likely would never need anything more powerful. The package cost a whopping $20,000 in 1998 dollars. The first drawing I produced was this concept. The drawing worked, although I had so much to learn. This first iteration of this new tool was memorable because, in spite of this new machine’s supposed ‘incredible’ speed, there was a considerable lag between my pen stroke and the line appearing on the screen. The drawing pad of those days had no screen. I would draw a line, wait a second or two and then see the line appear on the screen. But this new tool was amazing, and I could see the potential. Within a year, my hotrod computer was retired to the office and replaced many times over the years with ever faster machines. Eventually, I switched from a Windows machine to a Mac, and the digital drawing pad became an iPad, which made things more compatible and eliminated the lag. This worked the best for me because I could draw more naturally, as I did on paper and watch my hand drawing instead of the computer screen. Although I still enjoy drawing, at least the original sketch on paper, I love the ease of creating concept art on the computer. Changes and additions are easy. The steps from drawing to presentation are now instant. I would never go back to ‘the good old days.’
