Category: Arts
In this unit, we were supposed to create a perspective drawing of a city with cultures. I chose to draw Kaohsiung. To present Kaohsiung, I represented the culture by drawing buildings in Kaohsiung. My artwork was drawn in a two-point perspective because most people used one point perspective to draw their artworks. Since I didn’t want to draw streets, but a bigger picture of the city, I decided to have two vanishing points in my artwork. These two vanishing points were not drawn on the actual paper. I taped two additional pieces of paper at the sides so that the buildings do not totally vanish at the side and the artwork would seem more realistic. In two-point perspective drawings, the rule is that horizontal lines should be going to one of the vanishing points, and vertical lines should be perpendicular to the eye level, or the horizon line. This also means that all vertical lines are parallel to each other. I started off by drawing the 85 building. The structure was challenging to draw into a two-point perspective since it is the main key to create balance in the drawing. After drawing the buildings beside the 85 building, I found out that there was too much space in the sky and made the artwork unbalanced. So, I extended some of the buildings so that there are different sized cubes floating in the sky. This was the favorite part of my artwork because it not only created balance and a sense of unity and harmony to the artwork but also created a movement that the cubes are floating in the sky. For one of the buildings, it had a unique shape. I drew it so it was similar to the tallest hotel next to the 85 building. I actually planned on drawing love river at the left side of the artwork, but I eventually found out that in the map, love river doesn’t exist next to 85 building, so I filled in a color that could best create balance in the drawing. I think I did a good job in value for the cubes and the 85 building, but not for the smaller buildings. I think I used too less water to make value seem natural to others. It was also hard to control where the watercolor was going, so my craftsmanship was not good for this piece of artwork.
There were many things I could improve on in my artwork. For example, I have room for improvement for craftsmanship and value. I could’ve controlled where the watercolor was going so the colors won’t mix together. This also affects the value of my drawing. I will try not to keep redrawing the same places and ruin the value. Also, I had too less signs to show my understanding to perspective drawing. Even though it is a huge picture of Kaohsiung, I still should have included some big signs.
When I first started to design my carpet patterns, I had a picture of a symmetrical pattern in my head. So, I started first with the geometric shape designs in the center. The diamond-like shape was originally a square, with its corners at the borders of the four pieces of paper. However, I then had an idea to divide the corners of the square to three identical segments. I connected the corners to the borders of the papers, and a geometric shape I never thought of appeared. At first, I left this shape alone to work on the four star-like shapes on each piece of paper and the designs at each corner. However, I found out that the design now lacks creativity between values. The geometric shapes I created were blank, so I decided to add values to them. It turned out that my design looked a look better after that. The great contrasts at the four sides of my pattern design got the idea from zentangle. In zentangle’s example, they used circles like one of my patterns. However, I turned the shape at the opposite side of the circle into oval while the other two sides square and rectangle so that it creates a pattern and movement of the shapes. I also used hatching to fill out the background at each corner. Originally, I was planning on leaving it blank, but then I noticed that the corners are no balanced in colors, so I used the things I learned before to fill in the blanks. This also created emphasis in the spheres. The spheres at the corner were also inspired by the works I did earlier. I used value to shade the spheres so the light seems to come from the middle. The eight needlelike shapes at the corner were actually created by mistake. At first, I only wanted to connect thin lines, but I traced one of the lines from the wrong place, so I decided to color them in, and it became my favorite part of this artwork. The four starlike shapes were inspired by the shop by the street I live in. They had something similar to this design and I had this idea of creating it. To create it, I had to use rulers and pencils to make the most accurate assisting lines so the four of them can create harmony and a sense of unity. The organic shapes were added at the end of my design. They were used to fill in the spaces after the geometric shapes are drawn in. The four twisted clocks were inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I also let the time of the clocks change, which creates a rhythm to the design. For the organic shapes, I drew music, plants, lighting, and mud to create a variety to the organic shapes.
Improvements I can make to this artwork is to create more variety of patterns. I should also fill in the blank spaces between the star-shaped squares. I also regret putting stripes on the lines outside the diamond. I can also have better craftsmanship in coloring in the values for shapes.