Wildfire Ready
2025 · design

Wildfire Ready

Client: Ralph BloemersRole: Architectural visualization, show concept, title/logo design, illustration, information design, deck designSelf-reported
Generative AI
Illustration
Generative AI production

  1. The problem

    Home hardening has an image problem — people picture a gravel lot with no plants, so the fixes feel like a sacrifice instead of a beautiful, livable option.

  2. The approach

    Show, don't tell: a real architectural render library, a familiar makeover-show format with recognizable hosts, and a side-by-side guide that puts a real hazard next to its hardened replacement.

  3. What was built

    ~20-image render library, a four-version TV pitch deck backed by a 237MB master Photoshop document, and ~50 real inspection photos redrawn into a consistent illustrated style.

  4. The outcome

    The largest project of the year — a complete pitch package with title identity, illustrated hosts, explainer diagrams, and storyboards, assembled in roughly two weeks.

Wildfire home-hardening has an image problem: people picture a gravel lot with no plants, so the fixes feel like a sacrifice instead of a beautiful, livable option. This body of work, produced for Ralph Bloemers across February and August–September 2025, attacks that problem three ways — show people what “hardened” actually looks like, borrow a TV format people already trust, and put a real hazard photo next to its hardened replacement so the comparison reads at a glance.

Fire-Hardened Home & Landscape Renders

Photo-real architectural render of a wildfire-hardened backyard — non-combustible patio, native flowering plants past the five-foot zone, a family and pets in the yard
February 2025 — the straight, non-comedic half of the early work: an architectural render library proving hardening doesn't mean living on a gravel lot.

The renders work the defensible-space zones deliberately: Zone 0, the first five feet, is non-combustible throughout — decomposed granite, stone paving, low succulents, masonry walls in place of wood fencing. Beyond it the planting gets lush — poppies, kangaroo paw, flowering trees, lawn — proving a hardened landscape can still be a beautiful one.

Architectural render of a home's front entry showing the non-combustible Zone 0 detailing — stone paving, gravel, and low-water plantings against the foundation
Entry-zone detail — the buildings carry matching detailing: simple massing, metal and tile roofs, stone bases, no wood skirting.

Built as a deep stack of large-format layered Photoshop documents, the set spans photo-real dusk and night renders, mixed-media collage renders with cut-out figures and pets, and an illustrated black-and-white streetscape version of the same neighborhood for editorial use — roughly 20 images in the optimized delivery library.

Wildfire Ready Makeover, with the Scott Brothers

The largest project of the year, and a format shift: instead of a PSA, a home-improvement television format. The premise takes the familiar renovation-show structure and points it at wildfire resilience — hosts walk a homeowner through hardening their house the way a makeover show walks them through a kitchen.

A note on likenesses. The pitch casts Drew and Jonathan Scott — HGTV’s Property Brothers — as the show’s hosts, branded here as “the Scott Brothers.” Like the celebrity likenesses in Fast Fires Are Preventable, this is an unlicensed pitch stand-in to sell the casting idea to the client, not a licensed or produced appearance. Shown here as concept art.

Pencil-and-ink illustrated portraits of both hosts side by side, drawn in a consistent editorial style
Both hosts together — the pairing that carries across title cards, reaction poses, and storyboard panels.
Pencil-and-ink illustrated portrait of one host, drawn in a consistent editorial style for storyboard use
One of two illustrated host portraits — pencil-and-ink treatments built for storyboard and title-card use across the pitch package.
Pencil-and-ink illustrated portrait of the second host, drawn in the same consistent editorial style
The second host portrait, drawn to match — the pair recur across title cards, reaction poses, and storyboard panels.
Hand-drawn tablet-in-hand explainer graphic comparing an overgrown property (before) against the same property hardened to defensible-space standards (after)
One of the pitch package's explainer graphics — a before/after defensible-space diagram shown as a tablet-in-hand illustration, alongside detail callouts like the ember-proof mesh plate.

The full pitch package — assembled across four deck versions in roughly two weeks in late August, backed by a 237MB master Photoshop document — includes the dimensional metal-textured title identity, illustrated host portraits and reaction poses, pen-and-ink hardening illustrations for decks, front yards and entries, explainer graphics, and comic-strip storyboard panels of the hosts working the gutters/eaves/deck/doors checklist on camera.

From Risk to Resilience: Home Hardening in Practice

Split-image title card: one half a parched, cracked, orange-skied yard; the other half the same house green and blue-hour, captioned 'From Risk to Resilience: Home Hardening in Practice'
September 2025 — a companion piece to the makeover pitch, and the most practical deliverable of the year: a side-by-side guide pairing a real hazard with its hardened replacement.

Built from a working library of roughly 50 real inspection and resident photographs, redrawn into a clean, consistent illustrated style so the comparison reads instantly, without the visual noise of real photography.

Illustrated before/after comparison labeled 'Juniper' — an inspection photo with the hazard circled in red beside a resident photo of the same spot corrected
A representative spread: each panel is labeled by hazard — here, juniper planted hard against the foundation — with the inspection photo circled in red beside its corrected replacement.

Laid out as two decks — a straight photographic version and an illustrated “comic” version — the redrawing is what makes the teaching legible: the raw inspection photos are cluttered and hard to parse, and the illustrated pass strips that away.

What the AI generation actually bought

Four separate specialist disciplines sit inside this one year of work — architectural visualization, illustrated host portraiture, information design, and large-scale photo redrawing. Generative tooling (Ideogram, Gemini, ChatGPT image tooling, Magnific upscaling) is what made commissioning all four, at pitch speed and before knowing which would land, possible at all: a ~20-image render library, a complete TV pitch package in about two weeks, and ~50 real photographs redrawn into one consistent style — a scope that would normally be several standalone contracts.

What this archive doesn’t contain: any record of what happened after the pitch — whether the show format was picked up, the render library was published, or the guide was distributed and to what reach. That number, if it exists, sits with Ralph.

A hardened home doesn't have to look like a gravel lot — the renders were built to prove it.

Outcome
Concept and pitch deliverables for client review. No claim is made here about what was greenlit, aired, or measured — that record sits with the client, not this archive.
Scale
3 projects, ~85 images, Feb & Aug–Sept 2025
Tools
PhotoshopKeynoteIdeogramGeminiChatGPT image toolingMagnific
Skills
generative-ai-pipelinesai-image-generationai-asset-productionillustrationart-direction
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