In order for my carpet design to meet the requirements and to look beautiful at the same time, I first drew oval geometric shapes with different sizes that filled up the whole paper and created a sort of foundation of all my designs. Inside these geometric shapes, I divided them into small square blocks and filled some of the blocks in with hatching and cross-hatching patterns. While the leftover blocks continued to remain blank, it shows contrast with the blocks that are being drawn. Furthermore, the ovals that the blocks are based on are arranged from little to large with a gradual rate. With this kind of pattern, it creates a feeling that these ovals are coming from the same direction. After I’m done creating the foundation of this carpet design, I moved on to drawing organic shapes. Each little organic shape looks like distorted squares that have curvy lines as its edges. However, I drew many of these distorted squares and made it into a big rectangle. For each rectangle, it at least contains 3 layers with blending patterns. The gradience changed from dark blue color to light blue color from the top to the bottom. The reason I drew these organic rectangle shapes with gradience is because I feel like with the different values contained in an area, it could be very eye-catchy and become the emphasis of my drawing and creates harmony within. In addition, with more organic shapes with the same pattern being drawn, it shows unity. As my drawing of the organic shapes is completed, I feel like it’s still too blank with many white spaces that have not yet been filled up. As a result, I asked Ms. Oda and my peers for advice. They suggested me to add some more organic shape designs as the surrounding of the organic rectangle shapes. So, I applied the same concept of curvy lines and drew it around the organic rectangle shapes. In order for it to look as a whole with the curvy edged rectangles and show more variety in my drawing, I created different depth within every curvy line. I either made it look thicker and thicker as it reaches out, or I made it thinner and thinner as it expands. Another reason why I created different depth is because it created perspective in my drawing, making it look 3-dimensional with movement. Last but not least, with the same dark blue color used throughout every curvy line added to the rectangles, they together blended successfully as a whole and became an emphasis of the piece that I want to emphasize. Lastly, as I’m done drawing everything that I could draw to make my drawing seem extraordinary, I still felt like my drawing is lacking something, not something fancy, but something simple but necessary that could serve as a foil for all the designs. As a result, I came up with the idea of filling the plain white background with lines of different spaces within. I first drew some really light blue lines onto my design, which enabled me to add more lines within and create darker lines eventually. In conclusion, my carpet design basically contained geometric oval shapes with blocks of hatching and cross-hatching pattern at the back, organic rectangle shapes with blending pattern and curvy lines around, and lastly a light blue background.

Looking through my design as a whole, I really liked how I included straight and curvy lines in my work that is able to show variety, how I used organic shapes as the emphasis, and the geometric shapes as the foundation, how I used the concept of space to create different values of lightness and darkness, and lastly, how I drew different values to create blending and gradience, taking a further step on the basic idea of values. However, during the process and after completing my carpet design, I also asked my peer Sunny several times for advice and looked at the layout of her design as a reference. In her design, I really liked how she used hatching and cross-hatching skills throughout thoroughly and beautifully, showing a deep understanding of the lesson. In addition, I also liked how she used lines to create shapes by the direction it’s pointing to. For example, she used many lines that all point toward the same direction to create a sharp shape that looks like an arrow. Secondly, I liked how she included a variety of geometric and organic shapes next to each other, making them look as a whole and complete, instead of my design where I simply overlap the two different type of shapes together. Thirdly, I liked how Sunny remained some space between each little parts of the designs, making her drawing less crowded while still being artistic with varied ideas. Lastly, I liked how she contained different values in every geometric and organic shape, showing a hard effort and made her drawing look very special and pretty.

In order for a drawing to be better and for us to reflect back and learn from the process, improvements are needed. Looking at my design, I think I applied all the 8 different Principles of Art in my drawing. For example, I applied hatching, cross-hatching, and blending pattern in the ovals and the distorted rectangles in my drawing. With these patterns being applied individually, it created rhythm within. However, I think I could improve by making the patterns stand out more. Since I overlapped the two layers (the layer of geometric shapes and the layer of organic shapes), it’s not that easy to tell the pattern contained in the geometric shapes layer. As a result, I think if I placed the two layers next to each other, but still draw the distorted rectangles darker and the ovals lighter so the rectangles could be the emphasis, the pattern would be more clear. Next off, with my four pieces of design being relative to each other, it creates harmony and unity as a whole. However, as again, if I could place the two layers of geometric and organic shapes next to each other instead of on top of each other, I think it would look more harmonious. The reason I think having four relative pieces of design could create more harmony and unity is because if the four pieces of design are not relative, even though it could create more variety, and maybe harmony within each piece, however, it won’t have unity. Also, when the four pieces of design are not relative, harmony could not be that easily created. In some cases, some design looks cool and special individually, but not as a whole. For example, I saw a carpet design from a student in our class, the student drew their four pieces of design separately. One of the design is a sharp shape that looks like a sword with lines shooting outwards into different directions, and another piece of design I remember has a circle surrounding many different geometric shapes inside. Even though that design looks really cool when you separate them, but it’s not that visually appealing when you combine them together because the sharp parts don’t go very beautifully with smooth parts. As a result, I made my four pieces of design relative to each other, so it could create harmony and unity. Last but not least, I personally think I did a pretty good job on using the concept of movement and contrast to make a design the emphasis of the whole piece. The emphasis of my piece, the organic rectangles with curvy lines surrounding it, shows contrast and movement from within. The organic rectangles contain blending pattern, which creates contrast between the darkest row (of the rectangle) and the lightest row (of the rectangle). Furthermore, the curvy lines around the rectangle create movement. With the different depth shown in each curvy line, it feels like vines expanding into different directions, and the depth feels like the shadow of the vines, which created movement of the “vines” (curvy lines). With movement of the curvy lines and contrast within the distorted rectangles, they together blended together as one and become the emphasis of the piece. However, I think I could draw the thin parts of the curvy lines lighter, so I could emphasize the thicker and darker part. With the contrast of the rectangles already been shown, the contrast between the thin and thick part of the curvy lines could make them together more eye-catchy, with more varied kind of contrast presented, which could be emphasized more deeply. Finally, I think the concept of balance is being presented in my drawing by the different values of a single color (blue) being drawn. Balance is to create harmony when viewing the design as a whole and to balance between the minimum and maximum range you could do, which in this case, means to contain the same amount of the darkest and lightest color that could be drawn. First, I think I made my drawing balanced because I made them united and harmonious by having the four pieces being related to each other. Next, I drew the lightest, medium, and darkest value that a blue bullet pen can achieve, which also creates balance between the different values of a single color. With the logic that unity and harmony create balance being applied, I feel like if I place the geometric shapes and organic shapes next to each other without being overlapped, they could be more in harmony with each other.