After having snapped a photo of a city corner that stood out to me during one of my travels, I decided to draw it and experiment with perspective and architectural drawing. I focused on the realism of the piece and how I could make a drawing seem like real-life by creating vast differences between shadows and highlights. I played with line structure, density, and darkness to create certain areas of focus where the camera had picked up on details. Even the simplest blending, highlighting, or angle change transformed the dimensions and complexity of a part of the sketch. Drawing perspective has helped me with design drawings; I am able to visualize lines, value, and dimensions better. This real-world sketching helps me when I want to create something that does not exist yet.

To understand proportion and balance, I challenged myself to draw real-life objects and spaces while experimenting with contrasting shadows and highlights. My main goal was to experiment with drawing rounded objects and the complexities that come with this. In order to draw objects found in nature, I learned about how the human brain views the stopping points of objects as lines, but how in reality, the stopping points are just where the object rounds off and disappears and the human brain interprets this edge as a line in drawings as a way to visualize it. I experimented with charcoal and did a value, color, and hand study in order to apply these skills to my designs. Additionally, I studied patterns, shapes, and proportions in nature by sketching animals and such. Studying how nature forms different biotic organisms with different functions helped me determine the functions and forms of my own designs.