Paula Hsiao
The first thing I had to do when I got the paper was to decide whether I wanted to draw my city in one point or two point perspective. I didn’t really have any idea what I was going to create at first, so I just randomly picked two point perspective because I liked giving the illusion of 3D buildings. I thought that making the buildings 3D would help them to look more realistic since they wouldn’t just be boxes anymore. After that, I had to decide where my horizon line would be and place my vanishing points on the horizon. Since I had a slight idea that I didn’t want to have my vanishing points super high because I had tried that in one of my rough drafts and I found that it was way harder for me to draw when my vanishing points were higher, I decided to keep the eye level fairly low. Now since I was doing two point perspective, I had to place the vanishing points off the paper onto an attached scrap piece of paper because if the two points were too close together, the city would look like it was being viewed from a fish eye lense, so I extended the horizon line onto the attached scrap paper and placed my two vanishing points on there. So it was time for my to actually start drawing my city. Obviously, you have to start with the foundation (an important structure/thing that you base the rest of your drawing off of) or your bigger buildings. I was inspired by a picture Ms. Oda had showed us of a corner of a street. It was interesting to be able to see both sides of the street like that. This is why I decided to start drawing my street corner first, that way I knew how the rest of my buildings should look and where they should be. The street corner would be where the buildings stemmed from. So from the vanishing points, I drew a diagonal line towards the center left of the paper. The point at which they intersect became the corner and the diagonal lines became the sidewalk. Since I had the foundation of my drawing, I started to work on the buildings next. I knew that the shop on the corner of the street obviously had to be the most important because it was the only one that was on both sides of the street. To portray the importance of the building, I had to make it bigger than the others by drawing the perpendicular lines to the horizon line longer than the rest of the buildings. I also made the building’s width wider than the other buildings so that it was the main attraction in the piece. After the main building, I now had to place the “supporting” buildings that were going to be next to the main building. The placement of the supporting buildings was really important because I needed to place the right amount of buildings and make the buildings the right size so that the piece feels balanced on both sides (so that there’s not a giant building on one side and no building on the other). I repeated the process I had done to make the first building (draw perpendicular lines to the horizon to create the base of the building and then create the roof by drawing connecting lines to the vanishing points). I decided the size and width of these supporting buildings randomly. There really wasn’t much planning that went into deciding, I just drew until I felt like the buildings looked nice and adjusted if I didn’t like the size at the end. The supporting buildings were also supposed to give the drawing a more city-like feel because cities are often very busy and filled with different buildings/structures. I went back to add smaller details like the windows and doors once I was done with an outline of where my buildings were and what they would look like. Since I had an idea of where everything was, I was able to add more buildings or more windows based on what would make the drawing look more unified. I made sure to all a lot of windows on the taller buildings because when I think of a city, I think of tall skyscrapers that light up at night. After taking a second to look at my drawing, I realised that I still had a lot of empty space at the foreground and background of my drawing. I knew I had to add more buildings because the empty space made it feel more like a suburban city as opposed to an urban city (what I was going for). I added buildings in the back of the bigger buildings because the feeling of more buildings even far off into the distance made it seem more like a building. To add cultural elements was next on my list of things to do. Things like signs and landmarks are the things that usually make a city feel like it represents a culture. At this point, I still only had a small inkling of what I wanted the city to look like. So I focused on the kind of mood I wanted to create (a city frozen in time at night). I thought it would be a cool idea to capture a usually busy city when it was calm in the dead of night, so I picked New York, a city famous for their everyday hustle and bustle. I then added in signs like “New York Pizza” and the statue of liberty poster because these are the things people think about when talking about New York. Once I was done with the drawing part, I could start to paint. Like mentioned before, I knew I definitely wanted to show the city at night, so using the wash technique, the first thing I did was to add a light layer of blue to represent the sky because I know I can add color, but I can’t take color away, so I started light and worked my way darker, gradually adding more blue and purple (at the top for value). As I looked over to at Yvonne’s painting and saw the highlight she had in her sky, I decided to add a layer of yellow paint near the top of my buildings to show the light that illuminates off of a city. I think it really added a nice aspect to my painting and made it look like it had more depth. So using the wash technique, I went back and tried to paint the biggest buildings first since I knew I didn’t have much time left to finish. I decided to make the buildings a bolder color like red in order to contrast the chill night vibe from the sky. I spent too much time trying to blend different colors together in order to try and find a color that I liked, which is the main reason I ran out of time to color in the rest of my drawing like the posters and windows. However, since I made the decision to color in the biggest buildings first and work my way down, the painting didn’t look that barren even though the posters were white.