Contour Lines

Happy Birthday

This piece was made with just paper and pencil. This piece and the piece below were both created as gifts for my parents. In order to be fair, I used pencil for both instead of using wallpaper or an unconventional medium for one of them and not the other. Using an unconventional medium for both of the pieces would not have suited both of them. The theme for this piece is: Wild. The planning process included finding a picture online as a reference and creating my own birthday party scene from the reference. After drawing the general outlines of the shapes I filled in the shapes with random contour lines to show the contours of the objects. The thing I am most proud of in this piece is how successful I got the contour lines to get. Since this was the first time I drew contour lines, I was confused at first and worried about how my contours would look. Turns out, they didn't come out as bad as I had originally thought. After I drew my second piece, I understood more about how to draw contour lines. If I could go back and change something about my piece, it would to be to emphasize the contours of the different objects even more with more lines.

Las Vegas

Exactly like the piece above, this Las Vegas piece was made with only using pencil and paper. In addition, this piece is also twice as large as the one above. As stated above, the reason this piece also uses pencil and paper is so that both pieces will be consistent and have the same mediums. The theme for this piece is: Urban. Also similar to the planning process for the previous piece, I went online and looked up a picture of the Las Vegas sign and an aerial shot of nighttime Las Vegas. When drawing the actual piece, I drew the sign first and then drew the background of Las Vegas around it. I drew the piece with the mindset of being as random as possible. Random lines combined with straight lines show the precision yet openness of the wild city of Las Vegas. Random lines are great at showing the general contours, darks and lights of the scene. The thing I am most proud in the piece would be how realistic it looks without me having to put in extreme efforts to do so. Contour lines make the piece very believable from a distance. However, if I could go back and change one thing, it would be to make the bottom of the piece less "messy". Much of the bottom of the piece is just filled with random lines, lines that are a bit too random. I think the piece would look better if I had made the lines follow the more of the contours of the pavement/parking lot in the picture than looking like pure random scribbles.