Map Color Schemes

This is a color scheme exercise, featuring abstract patterns based on a collage of maps.

Left has tetrad featuring yellow, violet, blue-green, and red-orange.
A tetrad is a 4-color scheme with two pairs of complimentary colors (opposite on the color wheel).  The two pairs are yellow and violet, and blue-green and red-orange.  Because of that, two colors are on the warm side (yellow, red-orange) and two on the cold side (violet, blue-green).  To create the tertiary colors, I had to blend primary and secondary colors by coloring those areas with both pencils.

Middle has triad featuring red-orange, blue-violet, and yellow-green.
Triads are 3-color schemes where the colors are evenly spaced apart on the color wheel, resulting in 2 cold and 1 warm (or vise versa).  I enjoyed blending tertiary colors in the first one, so my choices were such that I would have all tertiary colors.  One regret I have is not applying water in the order from lightest to darkest.

Right has split-complimentary featuring orange, blue-violet, and blue-green.
A split-complimentary color scheme has 3 colors, with 2 being adjacent to the compliment of the other 1.  Like the triad, there is also 2 cold and 1 warm (or vise versa), but the difference is much more obvious.  This one is my favorite of the three.  I'm a fan of cyberpunk artwork, which is often dark cityscapes with a contrast between blue and orange.  To focus the color scheme on blue, that was the side I chose to split into 2 colors, while orange was only used for accents.

Self Portraits

Neither of these portraits are finished, but that's not going to stop me from writing!

On the left is an observed self portrait, done by looking at myself in the mirror.  To start, I used basic proportions to place all of the main features.  Eyes are halfway down the head, and the width of them is such that five go across.  Halfway down again is the space between the nose and mouth.  The corners of the mouth matched up to somewhere in my eyes.  The height of my ears would have been from the top of my eyes to the bottom of my nose, but because of my hair, they weren't visible.

Because I was working more on the second self portrait, I didn't get to finish this one.  Using my actual reflection as a reference was challenging, because I wasn't constantly still, and I had actually gotten a haircut at one point.  However, if I had finished it entirely, I believe that my placement of the facial features would have made a good foundation for an accurate final portrait.

On the right is the second self portrait, done using the grid technique.  I drew a grid over a printed photograph of myself (which was edited to be in grayscale and have a limited number of values), and a corresponding grid of the same size on a blank sheet of paper.  By making a window with pieces of scrap paper, I could focus on one square at a time, and draw only what I saw in it.

This portrait was much more finished and looked much more realistic than the first one.  The easiest parts were areas where the hair was pretty much solid black, and the more challenging squares were in the face proper and the top of the hair (hence why they aren't completely finished yet).  Although it does look pretty good, and have all the shading and the range of values, (besides the empty squares) there's some places where white space is visible as lines between the squares.  I wasn't working on them as I went along, so I only did a few before I had to go photograph the drawing at its current stage.

I like to draw myself, especially in a stylized way.  These portraits weren't so stylized, but even so, I managed an ok job.

Cityscape

This cityscape is a 2 point perspective drawing.

A horizontal line marks the horizon, and the two vanishing points are on it (but off the main page. The horizon line was extended with extra paper.)

Any vertical lines in the drawing are parallel, but all other lines were drawn towards either vanishing point using a ruler to align it.  For example, the middle building has lines defining the edge of the roof and the edge at the ground, but on the left of the center they go to the left vanishing point, and on the right it goes to the right vanishing point.

This gives the effect of the buildings appearing smaller as they are more distant from the viewer.  While the far-right building is drawn with a slightly taller line than the middle one, the perspective effect actually makes it twice the height.

Details on the buildings were also drawn by using the vanishing points, and not only the outlines of the buildings.  The design on the far left building is a simple grid.  The circle on the mid-left building, the text on the middle building, and the hearts on the far-right building were all made by first constructing rectangles, then drawing inside of them.  The windows on the left side of the middle building also appear to sink into the building somewhat, because of lines inside of them that actually lead to the right vanishing point.

Some specific successes in this project were the circle and the mixtape advertisement, because despite not specifically fitting to the lines, it was still done well.  I found this to not be very difficult overall, since I've worked with perspective drawings before.

However, there was a challenge with making things look proportional.  I felt that the size of the windows, doors, and sidewalks were off.  As I was drawing the buildings closer to the sides and with lines closer to the horizon line, it was difficult to distinguish the angles of the lines.