This is the basic sketch I started with. The concept was to show a saucer which had embedded itself upright into the yard in front of our house, with an alien or two posed in front of it. (This view is looking from the street toward the front of the house.) A medium size bush runs along the entire left side of the lawn, and since the yard is small, I figured that orienting the saucer to face the walkway to the front door would provide the best viewing angle. Originally, the structure was going to be similar to two umbrellas sandwiched together, but I realized that this would require twice the work and material to build (not to mention it would be difficult to wire with lights). So I decided to build a façade instead, kind of like the back-less buildings on the set of a Western movie. I envisioned the structure to be a large semicircle, like a fan, composed of triangular panels that could be assembled and broken down as separate units. Storage space in our house is a problem so whatever I did needed to be capable of being disassembled.