Circle Project

Artist's Statement:

The idea for this project came when I was looking through an old M C Escher book I had, and I saw his plays on perspective. The main goal was to experiment with circular composition. I wanted to fit a city inside of a circle to achieve that. I think that I was thinking about planets, and Le Petit Prince also, because it does look a bit like a planet with oversized buildings. The effect is a bit brain-warping, because it looks like the buildings are mirrored, but if you look closely there are differences.

I wanted the overall effect to be reminiscent of Escher. At first, I thought of doing a style and color scheme similar to Studio Ghibli's Castle in the sky, but I ended up deciding not to. I chose sharpie pen because I wanted to have a lot of detail, and I also knew that if in the end I decided I did want to have watercolor or marker, I knew sharpie would not bleed. I think that in the end, I made a good call, because the hyper detail was only possible because of the shape's fine tip. After I added color, it ended up defining the foreground and background a bit more.  

I started out thinking that I might make the crossroads a 3 prong, so I drew that in my initial sketch. I also thought that I might add a sun and moon, to have more circular composition involved. I ended up discarding the sun and moon, and having clouds instead.  I was a bit hard figuring out the perspective, because of the circular shape. I had some trouble because I made the sidewalk too large, which I tried to disguise with shading. In the end, I ended up having more buildings at the end of the road, which was not the original plan.