Ex 7 Study of a townscape using line

For this exercise I assumed it need to be in large format, but my sketch book is spiral bound so I couldn’t work over two pages.

I chose a view from a walkway bridge looking down towards a busy high street.  I liked the different heights and shapes of the roofs.  The view also offered a curve to the composition as the streets curved as they went downhill.  I also liked that the urban landscape was set against a rural background.  I used a viewfinder to narrow down the composition, again ‘hooking’ onto a building edge to ‘anchor’ the drawing.  I thought about rule of thirds making the clock tower off centre and the skyline above the centre.  The group of buildings to the left made a strong foreground with a softer foreground on the right with the trees.  The middle ground is made up of the clock tower and the tall 4/5 story buildings and the background is a soft rural landscape.

The day was dull and wet and I was thankful to be indoors with a handrail for support.

I wasn’t initially confident starting this.  It’s was quite uncomfortable standing plus it was cold.  I decided to do a couple of rough explorative drawings in pencil first to get a handle on perspective and to place the buildings and skyline in the correct place.  I spent a long time getting the clock tower and adjacent roof lines right.  Once I was happy, after making several corrections, the other building seemed to slot into place quite easily.  I kept checking the verticals and the interconnecting lines and angles of the buildings.  I liked the lampposts suggested the steepness of the hill.

By this time I was frozen to the bone, so I took a reference photograph so I could work from home.

Using the sketch, I re-drew in pen.  I found the centre of the paper and placed the clock face in relation to the centre of the paper and the other buildings.  Using the sketch and the photograph together I roughed in the positions of the buildings.  Once I was happy with the buildings, I put in the detail of the building.  Overall I am happy with this drawing as I was happy with the initial sketch drawn on location which I think transposed over quite well for the pen drawing.