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.

Beautiful Britain - Manchester Town Hall

Back to Britain today, and an A4 size drawing of Alfred Waterhouse’s high Victorian Gothic masterpiece, Manchester Town Hall. It was completed in 1877. The building contains offices and grand ceremonial rooms such as the Great Hall which is decorated with Ford Madox Brown's imposing Manchester Murals illustrating the history of the city, which, to be honest, are worth visiting the building for in their own right.  The clock tower rises to 280 feet. 

I’ve had a very soft spot for Manchester since my first visit to the city in January 2007. I was appearing in the first round of the BBC TV quiz show Mastermind. I’d appeared in four other quiz shows over the past couple of years, and hadn’t won any of them. This, mark you, considering that I thought of myself as a pretty good quizzer at the time too. I won that show, and since it was the first ever quiz that I won, I look back on Manchester with real fondness. 

It really is a fine city. It’s a brilliant mixture of the old and the modern. And, what’s more, it was the first city in England to bring back its trams – in the early 1990s!

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.

Beautiful Britain - Looking Across the Thames at St. Paul's - A4 fineliner

 

This is my latest Beautiful Britain Sketch. Unlike the previous sketches, this one is only A4 sized. I don't possess an A3 scanner, you see. 

If you'd like a copy of this sketch, it's available in my Etsy shop. For a ridiculously low price you'll receive a digital, printable copy of your very own, to print off and enjoy.

(We're all friends here, so I'm sure you won't mind me reminding you that all the images on this blog are copyright, nd any unauthorised reproduction or use is forbidden. )

There's a link to my Etsy Shop on the right, but in case you're that desperate to get there this instant, here's the link as well: - 

DaveClarkPortTalbot Etsy shop

As with other recent pictures, I did take a few photographs while I was sketching it. This was A4 rather than A3. I don’t possess a large enough scanner to accommodate A3, but my scanner will accommodate A4. Scanning gives me the option of selling my art digitally on Etsy.

This sketch is all about two things – the dome of St. Paul’s gives a vertical focus, and the bridge across the Thames gives a horizontal focus. I eye-judged where I wanted the dome to be, and then sketched it in to start. The rest of the background above the bridge is all about how it relates to the dome, and so once the dome was sketched in, then I reckoned that it should be relatively simple to sketch the rest of the background in. 

I could quote you chapter and verse about the history of St. Paul’s, but you’ll probably be glad that I won’t. But as a Londoner myself, and a proud one at that, the sight of St. Paul’s is one of those things which just makes me feel good – Tower Bridge, the Palace of Westminster and the BT Tower all have the same effect as well. 

Once the Dome was in I put in some of the first lines of the bridge, extending it to over halfway across the page. Then I drew the background buildings between the left hand edge and the dome. 

If you read my previous post about the Newcastle sketch, you might recall that I mentioned that there is usually a point in a sketch where you start to think that the sketch is looking as if it will turn out to be a LOOR (load of old rubbish). This was that point. I wasn’t happy with any part of this sketch, but I’m experienced enough with my own work to know that if you just push on and keep working steadily through, the end results usually turn out alright.

 As I got more involved in making the sketch, I forgot to take any more photographs, so this is the last one. The sketch here looks better than the previous one, because the little over half that has been completed gives a good idea of what the whole will be like. Actually, although the sketch at this point only extends a little over halfway across the page, well over half of the hard work has been done. If you look at the finished sketch at the top of this post, you’ll see that most of what’s left is the bridge, so while it had taken maybe 2 and a half hours to get this far, what was left required a little less than an hour. 

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.