Beautiful Britain - Durham Cathedral A4 fineliner

If you’re talking or thinking about Beautiful Britain, then sooner or later you’re going to need to get to Durham. I visited Durham for the first time by train, and arrived on a Sunday evening in February. The sight of the Cathedral, all lit up on the top of the hill was absolutely magical. 

Here’s a few photos I took while I was drawing this picture this morning. 

As with the St. Paul’s drawing earlier this week, this was carried out on an A4 pad with a 0.03mm fineliner pen. I didn’t actually start the sketch quite at the extreme left hand edge. You can see two towers, and the left hand one was where I started. Again, no grid, although if you don’t have confidence in your own dead-eye reckoning then I can certainly see why you’d want to use one. Once I’ve got my marker in – in this case that tower – then I can go about building outwards. One thing I did say to myself was that I was going to try to be a little more disciplined and not flit from feature to feature. So I worked on the cathedral building up to the point where the main tower starts to rise from it, then all of the foliage to the building’s left, and then all of the foliage beneath what I’d already sketched.

Carrying on this principle of completing one part before moving onto another, between the first photo and this one I sketched in the main tower. And not much else. I did put in the part immediately below the tower, at least, so you can see that I am at this point trying to stick to my resolution. I’ve also put in the outlines of the next part of the cathedral I’m going to work on.

 

This shows how I finished the cathedral then sketched in the buildings and foliage below it. In all honesty, it really isn’t difficult to draw a gothic cathedral. It’s almost all straight lines, for one thing. If you can draw a reasonably straight vertical line, you’re halfway there already. If you can also draw reasonably straight horizontal lines and diagonal lines, then you’re all of the way there. Like anything else, it’s a matter of looking really careful, to see how the different lines relate to each other. 

At this stage it looks like we’re slightly over halfway there, but as with the St. Paul’s sketch, appearances can be deceptive. The most fiddly part of what’s left at this stage are the buildings on the right, but these are only small when compared with the cathedral, so it’s possible to suggest what’s there rather than try to depict them in detail. 

Most of the buildings done by now, with only the foliage and the distant hills to do, neither of which is especially irksome. The difficult thing abot foliage in a sketch like this is making sure that you get the different textures and levels of shading. A mixture of more scribbly marks, and hatching lines of different directions, and also different spacing between them is what I used here to try to finish off the sketch. 

Here it is finished. The distant hill I decided would stand out better if I forewent any shading at all apart from the tree line at the top. The drawing gives an idea of the sheer size of the cathedral. If you look at the rose window, for example, there’s no other object or feature outside of the cathedral itself which even approached it in size.