Beautiful Britain - Piccadilly Circus A4 fineliner

 

Today’s drawing is of Piccadilly Circus in London. If you’d like a print of it, either drop me a line at londinius@yahoo.co.uk – or, even easier – you can buy a printable copy in my Etsy shop

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/DaveClarkPortTalbot 

Right then, let’s start. Now this is the most complicated scene that I’ve set out to draw since my sketch of Chester’s Eastgate last week. So I’m afraid that my modus operandi was never going to allow me to be methodical about working left to right. Even though it’s deliberately some way to the left of the centre of the scene, the focal point is obviously Eros, so that was where I had to start. Incidentally, you maybe already know this – but the statue we commonly call Eros isn’t actually Eros. Nor is it the Spirit of Christian Charity as some have tried to claim. No, Alfred Hodges Baily’s original aluminium statue represents Anteros, the twin brother of Eros. Anteros was the God of Platonic Love, while Eros was the God of Romantic Love and Naughty-naughties. 

I also sketched in the two larger figures below the fountain, as these would provide useful markers to help me put in other figures. Speaking of markers, I found the street lamp to the left to be a useful upright marker as well.

In the second photo you can see that I’ve been working my way downwards from the fountain. Firstly I completed the family group of figures by drawing in the mother, and the older child holding her hand. Then I filled in the figures between them, the fountain, and the street lamp. I find it useful when I’m doing a complicated street scene with so many figures like this to complete a ‘slice’ through the scene like this, as it gave me markers for the size of figures on the fountain, then below it, and so forth.

I also drew in the lamp post to the right of the fountain. This was going to help when I started on the buildings on the right. To the left, just beyond the lamp post I’ve started to put in a double decker bus. 

By this next picture you can see that the most obvious development is that I’ve start to put the buildings in. From the fountain to the centre on the right, and from the fountain to the lamppost on the right I’ve put in quite a lot of the detail, and I’ve also extended the roofline on both sides. This just makes it so much easier to keep perspective as you’re moving from the background in the centre, to the foreground at either side of the scene. I’ve also added more figures. For some reason I just didn’t want to do all of the figures in one go. I found it better to grow the scene outwards from the centre.

If you look at the right hand side of the picture it may give you an idea of how I work. There’s a traffic light which meets up with the vertical where two building divide, and so I filled in all of the figures up to that point. Perversely, though, once I’d done that I went back to the buildings on the left. 

I knuckled down at this point to try to complete the drawing up to the left hand edge. So as well as drawing in the buildings, I’ve also drawn in figures, finished the bus, added a transit van, and the steps some people are sitting on. As it is I did do a tiny bit more work on the left hand side, extending the traffic island and adding a keep left sign, but that was hardly onerous. All of which left the right hand half of the sketch.

 Actually in terms of surface area I had about half of the sketch to do, but in terms of work it was quite a bit less, since it’s mases of figures like those clustered around the fountain which take a lot of time in a complicated sketch like this one. There were still figures to add, but none quite so time consuming as we’d already done. I often feel like I’m on home ground when I’m drawing in the details of a building and by the time I’d got as far as when this photograph was taken I already had something whereby, if I’d cut off the blank paper remaining, I’d have still had a decent sketch. It wasn’t what I was planning, though.

This penultimate photo demonstrates again how I was working. You can see that I’ve already drawn in the figures as far as that piece of street furniture ( it’s something to do with electricity – stop me if I get too technical). I’ve started drawing in the details of the building above them. By this stage I’d made the decision that I’m going to keep the buildings which are on the further right of the picture largely unshaded.

 

So that’s it. I didn’t have room to sketch in the Lillywhite’s sign in its entirety – in a way, though, it’s quite funny that I have that sign where the buildings are unshaded. All in all, it must have taken a good 5 or 6 hours today. I’m getting slower in my old age.