Oriental Themed Village Design Sketch/Plans/Ideas

Well, I couldn't clean up the scan enough to get anything worth posting from it, so I opened up Photoshop and doodled out part of my current design sketches and notations. Things to keep in mind when doing Oriental themed buildings and terrain is the overall use of wood, natural fibers (rice paper, rice/grain thatching, rope), and use of space based on a set measurement scale.

Japanese buildings are based on a 'scale' around Tatami mats, which have 3 different standard measurements based on region of Japan. In the case of my buildings I will be abstracting that and going with 1" = 1 meter. Tatami mats are exactly twice as long as they are wide, so in my case the mats are 1" x 2" (1m x 2m) for measurement purposes.

Here is one of the sketches I've worked up to show some of the basics, more will be posted through the week as I get working on the buildings.

The rooms in the image are very very rough, and the mats are not to scale, just to show auspicious placement of the mats. Auspicious placement means that the junctions of mat edges will always form a 'T', and never a cross or '+'. Auspicious placements are thought to bring good luck, while inauspicious placements bring about bad luck.

Feudal Japanese homes and buildings tended towards heavy wooden doors to exterior areas, unless the home had a walled garden/courtyard, in which case rice paper doors opened to those areas. A typical home would have a front and possibly a back door, and several barred windows. While a home for a local lord or samurai may have a walled garden/courtyard, and have a wooden front door, but rear doors made of rice paper partition doors opening on a patio the length of the building which overlooked the walled in area and outbuildings.

Okay, so here are my starting notes. Comments and critiques are always welcome. I plan to get working on the first floor design and initial wall construction on the first building tonight. If all goes well I'll have pics of that work tomorrow, as well as a further design idea image.

Until later!