Beautiful Britain: Coventry Cathedral

 

Coventry Cathedral. Many cities across Europe faced devastation and destruction during world war II, and Coventry suffered as much if not more than any other city in England. The gothic cathedral of St. Michael was left in ruins. In 1950 a competition was held to design the new cathedral. The competition was won by an architect, Basil Spence, who was knighted for his work. The modernist structure is not everyone’s cup of tea. Personally, I think that the decision not to demolish the ruins of the old cathedral was a very fine one, as I think it’s the contrast between the gothic ruins and the modern building which make this striking.

This one was made with a 0’1mm fineliner – my trusty 0.03mm pen is knackered after being used in every other sketch this month.

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.

Beautiful Britain : York Minster

 

Yesterday I used my grey fineliner which I bought on Friday to make a drawing of the Royal Liver Building in Liverpool. If you read yesterday's post, then you'll remember how disappointed I was with the results. Today, I resolved to have another go, but this time to use the grey where I'd normally use hatching or cross hatching to achieve shading and shadow effects. No production photos this time, I'm afraid. 

York is just a beautiful city, and a great place to visit. I first visited to see the National Railway Museum, and I remember distinctly that it was the day that Red Rum won his third Grand National. I enjoyed the museum very much, but I was even more blown over by the Minster, and the Shambles, which was a bit like walking back in time. When I was at uni I visited the Jorvik museum twice as well. 

I haver actually sketched this very scene before. About 18 months ago I made this ink ad wash sketch: -

It's interesting to compare the two, since today's sketch was always meant to be monochrome, and so I think you can clearly see it's a lot more detailed. I like the painted version too, mind you.

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I had no intention of adding paint to today's sketch since it's one of my Beautiful Britain drawings. We're not doing too badly with this series, either. I've already sold two of them - Chester and Edinburgh, and had interest expressed in a few of the others as well. 

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 Europe: Mont St. Michel

 

I was wondering what I should sketch next for my beautiful Britain prints. Then I watched a TV show that I recorded a couple of weeks ago all about Mont St. Michel. That was it. Beautiful Britain could take a hike for the rest of the day – I knew that I was going to sketch Mont. St. Michel. 

I first visited Mont St. Michel in the mid 90s when I accompanied my first school trip to France as a teacher. Because the rest of the surrounding area is so flat, you can see it from miles away, and it just gets bigger and bigger as you approach it, and you see more and more detail. 

The Gothic building at the top is the monastery, and the monastery is the reason why everything else which came later is there. When you enter through the walls at ground level, the roadway gradually spirals up around the mount towards the monasteries. At the bottom it’s all tourist shops and stalls, and I remember standing behind two of our pupils who were looking at crucifixes. One girl held up one, admiring it, while the other held up one and said, “Ooh look! This one’s got a little man on it!” 

Prints are available from my Etsy shop

DaveClark Port Talbot Etsy Shop

 

Glasgow Tram at the National Tramways Museum

 In terms of art, I’ve really had two big projects on during the last week or so. One has been continuing to produce my beautiful Britain ink sketches, and the other has been to try to resurrect my Etsy shop. I’m quite pleased with what I’ve achieved in the last couple of days, and I was particularly pleased when I got up yesterday morning to see that I’ve sold a print of my Berlin tram sketch. “Yum yum,” says I, “that’s an excuse for another tram drawing!” Not that I need an excuse. 

A fortnight ago on the Tuesday I took a day off to go and visit the National Tramways Museum in Crich in Derbyshire. I had a good day out – although entrance to the Museum is NOT cheap, but then it did include a ride upon a tram. I’ll come back to that. To cap off the day, when I finished in the museum I drove into Nottingham to ride the Nottingham NET trams. 

Coming back to Crich, I did take photographs with a view to making some pictures at a later date. In particular I photographed the number 22 Glasgow tram, which was the one I got to ride upon. As it happens I painted this particular tram three or four years ago, in acrylic, and sold it, which led to one of my favourite commissions as well.

 

Using my photograph as a reference, I sketched the tram in pen yesterday. Here’s the finished sketch. I didn’t take any production photos – sorry about that. Trams are something I enjoy sketching very much. I usually complete the tram before I add any background. I drew the outline of the front of the tram from the top of the bottom deck downwards, and filled in all of the detail and shading. Then I drew in the side of the bus from the same level down. I usually do all of the bodywork of the lower deck before tackling wheels and all the gubbins underneath. They’re usually an area of a tram or train where a little suggestion and judicious use of shading can get you a long way. 

Basically it was a case of repeat what you just did with the upper deck. The upper deck is always quicker and easier, because I’ve already done all of the working out for the bottom deck – things like window spacing for example. Then when the whole tram is completely drawn and shaded I start to think about the background. Normal principles apply – the further away an object, the less detail it needs to be sketched in. Because the tram is so large and dominates the picture, it really didn’t take long to put in the background, and there we are, the sketch was finished.

 

I wasn’t at all unhappy with it either. However, I got up this morning, looked at it again, and thought – you know, it might look good with a touch of watercolour. So I scanned it before applying any colour, and then got weaving. Here’s the result.

You might be wondering why I didn’t paint in the sky. Good question. Sometimes even someone who knows as little as I do about Art can give a technical explanation for what I do. More often, though, it comes down to a feeling. I felt that this was enough – that if I pained in the sky, which was a light, fine cerulean blue on the day, it wouldn’t improve the picture, and actually might make it worse. I liked it as far as I’d taken it, and that’s enough.