Drawing Buildings

 Last Sunday I posted about how I draw figures as part of a crowd scene, following my Beautiful Britain drawing of Piccadilly Circus. That was in response to a query forum a fellow member of my favourite Facebook drawing group. I made the point that any advice that I give should be taken with caution, bearing in mind that I haven’t had any Art lessons since I was 13 (and the lessons I had in school up to that point weren’t all that great if truth be told.) Well, that still holds good, obviously. So I’m not posting this saying – this is how you SHOULD do it – only this is how I do it, and if you find that helpful, then I’m delighted. 

How do I go about sketching buildings, then? Well, let’s make the distinction between urban sketching buildings on the spot, and working from photographs. Working from photographs is a lot easier. This isn’t just because you can take your time and probably work in more detail. When you make a sketch from life, your eye, brain and hand have to do some quite complex things. You’re turning a 3D image into a 2D representation, which has finite edges. When you sketch from a photograph, the camera has already done all of that hard work for you. 

I always start by having a really good look at the building (or photograph of the building) that I’m going to draw before I start to draw it. That’s something I think you should do before you draw anything. I’m sure I’m not different from a huge number of artists who draw as much with their eyes as with their hands. I try to work out what it is that makes this building stand out, and makes me want to draw it. Let’s look at a sketch I made during the last week – Manchester Town Hall. 

One of the interesting things about this building is that it’s rather like an inverted T, with the tower and spire. This is a building which exudes power, confidence and authority – hardly surprising since it was built at a time when Manchester really had become an economic powerhouse. So both of these observations helped inform the choices I made while sketching it. 

Exaggeration is a useful tool, especially if you’re trying to make a building look impressive. I slightly exaggerated the size of the left hand end of the building, making the upright lines a little taller than they are, and making the perspective lines more acute. I’m always conscious that I’m not trying to produce a perfect photographic record. If you take this thought to its logical conclusion, then you don’t even need to make your straight lines all that straight, or if straight, you don’t need them perpendicular or parallel to the page edges. I’ll try to show what I mean – here’s a couple of watercolour and ink sketches I made a while ago:-

 

I found that playing with the forms like this did get across the feeling of massiveness I was looking for.

 

This picture of the Grand pavilion in Porthcawl shows this even more. This and a couple of my other sketches of the time are heavily influenced by one of my favourite artists, Ianf Fennelly. Except that he does this really well. If you go to his website – click here – then you’ll see what I mean.

 Ian Fennelly Gallery

Another piece of advice I would like to give you is that if you’re going to make a habit of sketching buildings, it can be very useful just to learn a little bit about various architectural styles. For the sake of argument, let’s say that you were attempting to draw a medieval gothic cathedral. You don’t need to be an expert at all, but you might well find it useful to know what a gothic medieval building is actually like – and why it looks the way that it does.

 One other thing to think about before you put pen/pencil to paper is how much background, if any, you plan to include. While I’ve done full background, no background and all stations between in different sketches, I think some background at least is usually better than none. If you compare this grey sketch of the Royal Liver Building

 

With this sketch of Tower Bridge –

 I think you can see what I mean. The bridge is still clearly the star, but the background gives it context, and in fat does who just how much it dominates the scene, which is part of what I was trying to say about the building in the first place.

 People often comment on the level of detail I put into a building. Actually, on all of my sketches, a lot of the smaller details are actually sketchy, since that’s how they appear to me on the building I’m looking at, or the photograph. As a rough rule of thumb, if the bit of the building you’re looking at looks blurry or indistinct to your naked eye, well, that’s how it should look on the drawing.

 Like a lot of other people, I can be very critical of my own work, but I’ve learned not to give up, and not to throw finished drawings in the bin. So one last piece of advice I’d give, is that if you think a drawing you’ve made of a building doesn’t work, try to learn something from it. Put it to one side until you can look at it objectively. Then look at it again, and try to focus on exactly what it is that you’re not happy about. Or, if you think that there’s a lot of different things you’re not happy about, then try to pick out the one you’re least happy about – the most glaring problem. Then either try sketching the same building again – perhaps from a different viewpoint or angle. Or failing that, a similar building, and make your focus to try to avoid that the issue that you picked out with the first sketch. I’d also look – without trying to copy – at drawings that other artists have produced of the same buildings, and see if there’s something you can take away from looking at the materials, style and approach that they have chosen.