Beautiful Britain - Newcastle Upon Tyne - Tyne Bridge

 

People who see my drawings often make comments like – I don’t know how you can do this – or – I wish I knew how to make something like this. So I thought it might be interesting to try to take you through the process. This isn’t a tutorial – I don’t feel qualified to teach anyone how to draw. Apart from anything else, I don’t want to encourage anyone else to pick up any of my bad habits.

So, this latest sketch is of Newcastle Upon Tyne, and the Tyne Bridge, one of my favourite bridges. Since this is a detailed sketch which I wanted to spend time over, I used photographic references. When using photographic references, I know that a lot of artists would use a grid . This is especially effective if you are looking at your photograph online, as it's very easy to superimpose a grid upon it. I’m afraid that the big kid in me just wants to get started committing ink to paper, and so I try to do the work of the grid with my eye. I try to judge the proportions with my eye. 

Here’s the first photo I took during the sketch.You can see that the bridge towers on the left have been more fully sketched in than any other feature at this point. This is because I made the conscious choice to start with the closest tower. I took some time to judge just how far from either side of the photograph the tower was, and how far from the top and bottom it extended. The next step was to draw in the roadway on the bridge, and the opposite tower.

You might notice the large roofs at the bottom left hand corner. I didn’t want to sketch them in completely at this stage, until I had more details around the bridge sketched in to help me judge angles and distances.

If this had been an A5 sketch, or even an A4 sketch I probably wouldn’t have sketched in the outline of the arch of the bridge this early. However, I thought it would e a good idea to do it now, because the arch of the bridge would give me a good marker against which to place various background and foreground features. This required nerve and confidence, though, because at this stage, the arch is always going to look awful.

By the time I took this second photo, having the bridge roadway and the arch sketched in gave me the markers I needed to begin to sketch out the roof line at the bottom of the page a little further. Then I wanted to take on the next big feature, the undulating, almost hump backed silver building behind the arch of the bridge. Once I had the outline of this building it enabled me to sketch in the background to its left. Once I’d added detail to this building, then this encouraged me to draw in some of the cross beams of the arch. Now, I have to be honest, I was never happy with the arch of the bridge, and I did try minor surgery while I was filling these parts in, but at the end of the day once you’ve committed you really have to make the best job of it that you can. I also put in some of the stays, tying the roadway to the arch. It made sense to put these in, to make sure they look like they are in front of the background buildings.

Another big feature that I wanted to place onto the paper was the ship. I believe that this is the famous Tuxedo Princess nightclub. I’m not in the habit of making complete outlines of specific features of a drawing before I start to add in the detail, but I did in this case. I just thought that it was such a complex scene that I really needed to see how a big feature like this fitted into the scene, and the best way to do this was by putting in a basic outline.

By this third photo you can probably see how I’ve added detail working from left to right. What does surprise me looking at the photograph is at this point I still hadn’t put in all of the stays holding the roadway to the arch. In all honesty it would have made a lot more sense to have sketched all of them in now. I’m afraid that this highlights one of those bad habits I mentioned earlier. I’m a real butterfly. I lose a bit on interest in the bit I’m working on, so flit away to work on something else for a little while. What can I say – I don’t even realise I’m doing it while I’m doing it. I’ve added more detail and definition to Tuxedo Princess by this photograph.

I’ve also by this stage started the construction of the far end of the bridge. I haven’t started sketching in the towers yet, but the part where the arch finishes beneath the roadway is there, and this is vital for my eye measuring of the towers, which would follow. At this stage, though, I didn’t want to start filling in detail this far right in the picture until I’d added more detail working from the left towards the centre. That would all have to wait though, since this was the photo I took before putting away the sketch for the rest of the evening.

I took this photograph after maybe half an hour’s work this morning. You can see how I’d sketched in more of the details behind the bridge, and, at last, all of the supports holding the roadway. There’s a lot of serious hatching and cross hatching been put into the roofs at the bottom of the page as well.

I’d extended some of the detail of the girders and the lattice work further around the arch of the bridge. I find that whenever I am constructing a piece of art, there’s a point where you have to really hold your nerve, and tell yourself that however bad it may look now, it will come good in the end. That’s as true for my acrylic paintings as for my sketches – with the difference being that my sketches usually come good (to an extent) whereas my acrylic paintings – not so much. Well, with this sketch it was that arch, but by this stage I was feeling happier. It’s not that it’s technically any better than it was by this stage, but that the arch is blending in more with the background.

So, once I’d added more detail to the background behind the bridge, then I worked on the detail of the back ground between the bridge roadway and the ship. You might not haver noticed straightaway, but I did at this point also sketch in a suggestion of the reflection of the ship upon the waters of the Tyne.

As I said, I worked to complete the rooftop complex at the bottom of the page, and also sketched in a rather lovely curving parade of buildings. I was in two minds at this point whether to complete all of the lattice work on the bridge, but I felt that I would be better off sketching in the towers at this point. They would give me helpful markers for areas of the background which would be visible from the lattice work.

If you look at this fifth photograph it really doesn’t look as if I’ve added hardly anything to the sketch. Yet what I had done was important. I’d continued work on the background underneath the arch of the bridge, and everything has been outlined, it’s just some shading of foliage which needs doing.

In addition, I’ve sketched in the main parts of the lattice work for the whole of the arch. There’s still shading and detail to add, but the more details you add to a specific part of the picture, the easier it is to add further necessary details to it. I’ve also started some of the necessary detailed work on the underside of the arch.

Looking forward to working on the background above the bridge roadway on the right hand side of the picture, I also sketched in the outline of the largest building in this part of the scene. This would provide a valuable marker. In all honesty I wasn’t really worried about this part of the picture, to much as with what was going on by the waterline, which was far less clear in my reference photograph, and it was the time give it some serious though about how I was going to make sense of it, and convey this in the picture.

 

This is the last photograph I took before completing the sketch. You can see that I’ve sketched and shaded the detail into the block on the left, and also extended the bridge roadway to help me divide up the areas of background left to do here.

As for the waterline, well the solution I came up with was a combination of darkness, shaded walls the deck just above the waterline, and areas of foliage of differing amounts of shading.

I’ve also sketched in the last large feature of the scene, the jetty at the bottom to the right. You may have noticed by now that we’re not looking like we’re going to get as far as the right hand edge of the page. Quite right. Accident or design? Well, it was just the way that it was working out, if that’s what accident means. Oh, that is what it means, fair enough. Which is another good example of why I said at the start that I don’t want you picking up any of my bad habits.

What remained to do after this was to finish suggesting the buildings and features of the background to the far right. Darkness, shading and foliage largely took care of what was underneath the bridge roadway as far as the waterline. Some graduated shading  underneath the jetty and the hint of a bridge linking it to the bank, and we were done.