By Yahya Ayyash Firdaus
As the theme of the first 11th grade's art exhibition had been decided which was architecture during Prophet Muhammad's era, I got an idea on making a piece of art of ancient Arabic buildings on a thick papers. First I drew rough sketches on smaller papers, then I implemented my experiments on the larger paper.Â
The equipments I used on this painting were Faber-Castell 12 Goldfaber Aqua for the aquarel basecolors, Faber-Castell 12 Polychromos Colour Pencils for the details, and Faber-Castell Graphite Sketch Set for the sketches.
I took my inspirations from ancient Arabic architecture, also called as Islamic architecture style I could find on the internet especially Pinterest. I also included some desert foliages such as date palms, cacti, and some dune shrubs. For the details of the buildings, I added some mashrabiya, which are window ventilations and more atributes like wooden suports and stone carvings.
These are some earlier sketches I made before making the main artwork which helped me to determine the shape of the buildings to draw on the main media.
The color scheme I impelmented on this artwork is various, starting with light brown as the base color because sandstone is used most as the main material of a typical traditional Arabian building. Then I added some shades on the sides that are blocked by other objects from the light source, and finally I added some brighter colors such as yellow for the areas that are exposed directly to the sunlight to make the scheme feels warm, orange, red, green, and purple as the contrast of accents, and dark blue and brown as the shaded areas to make the scheme feels cooler.