Beautiful Britain : Royal Liver Building in Grey Ink

 

This is an experimental drawing. I went out yesterday morning to buy a new A4 sketch pad and I was looking at the fineliners, and noticed a special offer on a set of grey pens. So I bought them and this morning I wanted to give one of them a try. So I set out this morning to make a drawing of the beautiful Royal Liver Building in Liverpool. It was designed by Walter Aubrey Thomas, and opened in 1911. So it predates Art Deco, but if you look at it, you can see that it has several features which are a foreshadowing of things to come.

I started with the top of the tower and worked my way downwards for the top of the façade. On this first photo you can see that I completed all of the detail and shading before moving on to the next step, the pilasters on the right. A pilaster is a square column supporting and adjoining a wall, which is attached to the wall and juts out of it. They look way out of true in these first two photos, but that’s more to do with the angle at which they were taken.

The next photo shows that the next thing to do was to sketch in the windows on this section of the building. Each window sketched in on a building like this helps you clarify your sight lines for the rest. You might notice as well that I’ve started stretching one of those pilasters towards the ground level. You know, every time I do a series of work in progress photos like this, it does just tend to remind me how undisciplined I am. I ask myself, why on Earth not put in the pilasters on the left at the Same time as those on the right? I honestly have no idea. All I can say is that doing it the way that I did seemed to feel right at the time.

The next photo shows that I did at least work my way doing all the windows from right to left quite methodically. I was drawing in the pilasters as I went along.

The next step was to complete the façade by drawing in the features at the ground level. Having all the windows above to work from, this was relatively quick and simple to achieve. With the façade completed, all that remained was completing the left hand side of the building, and then putting in a couple of the background buildings.

So, overall, I’m a little ambivalent about the sketch. On paper it doesn’t look too bad, but in both scan and photograph the building looks a little more wonky. As for the grey, I think the sketches look more dramatic in black ink. Oh well, it was worth a try to see how it worked out anyway.