Sketching Tips 9) Sketching Living Creatures

Sketching any member of the animal kingdom is tricky. That includes human beings. The very thing that makes living creatures so interesting - their life and energy – is exactly the same thing that makes them so difficult to sketch. Living creatures often move. This creates huge problems for the urban sketcher, and as with human figures, it does necessitate finding a method which works for you.

Here’s some things for you to consider doing:-

* Cheating

OK, I say that tongue in cheek. Basically, by this I mean using a photo. Now, as well should all know by now, if you sketch from a photo, however nice it may turn out to be , it isn’t an urban sketch. I want to stress this now. In my opinion, if you possibly can sketch something from life, then you should. Intrinsically a sketch made this way has far more value than a sketch of a photograph, which is at least a stage further back removed from life. However, sometimes you are just not going to have the opportunity to sketch a particular creature from life, and I freely admit that sketches such as these next few were made from photographs:-

The attraction of sketching from a photo is obvious. The animals have been caught by the camera in a particular stance, and they aren’t going to move from that stance. I’m unlikely to encounter most of them without going to zoos or in the case of the Komodo Dragon, taking what would probably the most expensive sketching expedition of my life. 

* Sketching stuffed animals

Is this cheating? Not as long as you’re clear when you’re writing down what it is that you’ve sketched. Now, personally I’m not a great fan of taxidermy. But I have to say that it enabled me to make this sketch of a coelacanth (ironically a ‘living fossil’) in the Zoological Museum in Kaunas in Lithuania. 

Due to the conditions required to keep a coelacanth alive, it’s highly unlikely I’m ever going to see one living, so I don’t feel too guilty about sketching this one. 

* Sketching creatures that don’t move around a lot.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce you to my cat, Hero. 

Yes, Hero is a gorgeous looking long haired black and white cat. He can sit in the same position for hours . . . until you try to sketch him. So even with a rarely moving creature like Hero, I find I have to use a technique to capture him. The thing that a creature like Hero is most likely to move is his head. So that’s where I would start. Eyes first. Then outlines of nose, mouth and shape of the head. No shading at this stage – once the outlines are in, then you can capture the shading gradually. In the space of 10 – 15 minutes Hero is going to look away three or four times, so each time he turns back to me I just keep adding a little more, building the picture. I know that unless he gets up to leave, I can easily sketch in his body when I’m happy with the head.

Basically, this is the method I would use to capture any creature. If you look at this one:-

It should illustrate the point. These guys came barrelling down my street one Saturday, in the opposite direction. There were a huge number of them. So when they started coming back, I knew that a lot of them would be coming past. I quickly sketched the moving parts – in this case the front legs of one horse – the back legs of another, and the body and heads of the next 3 or 4. Then another composite of the guys riding in the buggy. Now, when there’s only one of the creatures you want to sketch, the principle still works the same, as long as it doesn’t run off completely.

Whether you’re sketching people or creatures, even when they’re moving they do tend to repeat the same movements, and this fact is your friend. So if we take this sketch I made one lunchtime :-

It pretty much illustrates this point. Both of these were moving their heads about quite a bit, but would repeat pretty much the same position as they did so. I didn’t even start on the bodies until the heads were done, and this worked pretty well. 

Sketching living, moving creatures is hard, and it can be very frustrating. However, if you want to improve your sketching, it really is wonderful for training your hand-eye coordination, and also helping you to loosen up, and get a decent impression of what you’re sketching more quickly and with fewer marks on your paper. 

A few random points:-

·       Make the distinction in your own mind between an urban sketch and a detailed animal sketch. If the animal you’re sketching is just a part of a moment – for example, like the horses and buggies barrelling down my street – then please try to resist the temptation to photograph it now then sketch it later. Sketch it now, then you won’t need to photograph it. On the other hand, if you sketch a photograph of an exotic creature you would never normally meet, well you’re not going to try to pass it off as an urban sketch made the time that you actually met this creature, so I can’t see any issue with that.

·       Sketching a living creature from life – start off by sketching in the parts of the animal that are most likely to move. Go for quick outlines, and you can worry about shading later on.

·       Don’t panic if the creature moves. As likely as not it will repeat the same position if you’re patient. This won’t always happen, but this is what makes it so rewarding when it does.

·       You may have the opportunity to make a composite sketch of two or more members of the same species, so don’t despair.

·       When you first start sketching creatures from life – I’d start out trying to sketch it as quickly as you possibly can in as few marks on the paper. If you work on speed from the start, accuracy will come later.

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Sketching Tips 8) Sketching Vehicles

I don’t think there’s any special skill involved in sketching vehicles, but maybe what makes a difference is whether you like vehicles for their own sake or not. For example, there’s a world of difference between a sketch which has cars in it: -

And a sketch of a car: -

In the top picture it’s the footbridge which is the star. The cars, which are not particularly detailed and not brilliantly drawn, are just there to give the footbridge context and scale. In the second picture, the street furniture, the wall and the car behind are just outlines, which serve to highlight the car itself which is the star of the picture. If the cars are just a background feature, then you really don’t need many lines to suggest the shape of a car to the eye of the beholder. 

So, when you’ve decided that the car – or tram, bus or train – is the star of the picture, what then? Well, the first thing you need to think of is composition, and what I mean by that is, where are you going to put the viewer in relation to the vehicle. I’ll give a couple of examples to help explain this.  In this picture :-

- you can see that we, the viewers, are looking down onto the Bubble Car. This is appropriate, since it helps emphasise the diminutive size of the car which is one of its most interesting features. By the same token in this picture,

we’re looking up at the train. Our eyeline is roughly level with the bottom of the door nearest too us. This, and the rather extreme perspective serve to emphasise the train’s great size, power and speed.

Once you’ve worked out the viewer’s viewpoint in relation to the vehicle, then it’s worth spending some time deciding just how you’d like to contextualise the vehicle. I’ll explain that. Both of the vehicles above appear on the page themselves without any background. That’s because in those pictures I’m only interested in the qualities of the vehicle itself, and didn’t feel the need to contextualise them. However, adding background can help your sketch say more about the vehicle, and it’s not a bad thing to spend a bit of time considering just how much background, if any, you want to use. For example:-

The very light foliage in the background of this beautiful Jaguar XK120 conjures up an image of driving down summer country lanes with the top down. On this next picture:-

the railings and shaded shoreline are just enough to place this ice cream van at the seaside. With this Swansea tram:-

- I felt that the edge of the platform, the passengers and the pole carrying the cable overhead were enough to contextualise it. This can be compared with :-

Where I really wanted to include all the background details to help put it within a place and time within my childhood. This picture isn’t about the train so much as its about my memories of using the Tube, taking it to interesting places to see and things to do.

With this sketch, if you take away the airport buildings then it’s just a single decker bus, so the context is important to this sketch.

As for sketching in the vehicle itself, as with anything else you sketch it is a matter of looking, looking, looking, of getting the shapes right, and applying the shade in the right amount, in the right places. It sounds simple when you say it like that. Yet it needn’t be that complicated either. If you decide to go for a heavy contrast between areas of light and shade, you can end up with something like this:-

It's an effective depiction of a tank engine, even though the train itself really wasn’t a very complicated sketch, having so many areas of complete shading.

Of course, if you use more subtle shading, then you can make what looks to be a more accomplished sketch. This one underneath is not actually that well drawn – the front end of the boiler for example just isn’t quite right, but it still looks pretty good, I think, partly because of the amount of platform detail, and the contrast between the dark underside with the wheels, and the more lightly shaded boiler. 

Of course, if you’re feeling really confident and have time to really work at the sketch, then you can go to town on detail.

If you were to strip away the careful shading, what you’d be left with is still quite a complicated sketch, but nowhere near as complicated as it looks.

For me the attraction of sketching and painting steam engines is that they put a lot more of what they’ve got in the shop window than other types of train, or road vehicles. Look at even a rather simple tank engine and you’re still going to see pipes, domes, handles, and all other kinds of interesting bumps and protruberances.

Going back to my earlier point about viewpoint, you’ll notice that with each of these the viewer is looking up at the train, albeit to a slightly lesser extent than in the diesel train above. 

A few random points:-

·       When you’re sketching a car, bus, tram or train perspective and viewpoint are every bit as important as they are when you’re sketching buildings. If the viewer is looking up at a vehicle, this emphasises size and power, which can be enhanced by exaggerating the perspective more than normal.

·       You can always choose not to sketch in any background to the vehicle. However, if you just sketch in outlines of the background it can give the vehicle a context, while at the same time highlighting it.

·       Even really complicated vehicles, like steam locomotives, can be simplified through the use of areas of total shade, leaving you with a very simple set of outlines to sketch. Careful use of various gradations of shading can really give your sketch depth, body and definition.

Sketching Tips 7) Sketching foliage

Foliage

It’s been a while since I last gave a ‘lesson’ and so please let me start with a reminder of my usual caveat. I’m totally self taught, and all I can tell you is about my way of doing things. I’m not recommending it as the right way or the best way, just explaining that this is how I do it, in the hope that this might help. 

Now, most of the time foliage – by which I mean trees, bushes and grasses – is definitely not the ‘star’ of my sketch. I’m not deiberately dissing foliage here, but I’m a city boy originally, and what I find excites me is achitecture, machinery and people. So I tend to keep to limit the foliage to outlines with a few light shading marks. This usually provides a nice contrast with the actual object of the sketch. For example, in the sketch of a bridge in Aberavon below, the lightly sketched grass and the sky together frame the bridge, which is the real ‘star’ of the picture. A few vertical or almost vertical strokes do a good job of conveying the suggestion of grass to the eye.

In a similar way, in the sketch below which shows Pontrhydyfen Aqueduct, the darkness of the stone contrasts with the outlines of the forestry, which have not been shaded at all. To keep it light, I sketched in a few areas of shadow, but merely left them as outlines, which is a technique that I find can work particularly well when you’re trying to sketch in trees and bushes.

A couple more examples of me using this technique are these two sketches:-

The British Lion Pub Cwmavon. In this sketch I’ve even included outlines of some of the larger leaves, but again, none of the foliage is actually shaded, because the building is the focus, not the trees.

I like this sketch below, of Dyffryn Rhondda Post Office in the Afan Valley, because there is a contrast between the trees on the right, and the grassy hill side on the top left of the sketch.

Now, this minimalist technique for sketching foliage is fine when you are making a building, or something else the focal point of the sketch. However there may be times when you want to sketch the foliage itself in more detail.

This is a sketch of the disused Cynonville Railway Station. The track was ripped up decades ago, and the station now is on the route of a cycle path from Afan Argoed Country Park. Its leafy, overgrown appearance is very much the point of what I wanted to show about it.

As with the bridge picture, I’ve used vertical, or near vertical lines to show grass. However, as you can see I’ve applied far more shading to the bushes. If I was really focusing on the hut, then I’d just have only drawn the outlines of the shaded patches, and not all of them either for that matter. With this amount of shading you just can help but be struck by how overgrown the place is, and the hut itself seems to be merging into the foliage, which is very much the idea that I wanted to convey – that the trees and grasses are slowly reclaiming the land.  

Then there’s this sketch I made of my own back yard:-

If you look at it closely, you can see that it’s actually an inversion of the way that I usually depict foliage in a sketch. The buildings are lightly shaded, where shaded at all, while there’s heavy shading on the bush, and many of the individual leaves are sketched and even some of their marking details are sketched in. And the reason is that when I made the sketch, I felt that the bush was as much the ‘star’ of the picture as any other element.

A few random points

If foliage is not the most important element of the sketch:-

·       The more shading of the foliage that you do, the more you will draw attention towards the foliage and away from the main elements of the sketch, which isn’t what you want to do.

·       You can get good effects by simply sketching in the outlines of blocks of foliage, and also the outlines of areas of shading.

·       A few vertical, or near vertical lines sketched close together can give the appearance of grassy areas.

If foliage is one of the most important elements of the sketch:-

·       Sketch in areas of shading. As with many things, the more different gradations of shading you use to suggest lighter and darker areas, the more detailed your foliage will appear.

·       Heavy shading tends to make foliage appear denser, bushier and more overgrown if this is the effect that you want to achieve.

·       You can achieve some very appealing effects by using areas of dark shading around negative space in the shape of individual leaves, especially if the background to the tree or bush itself is lightly sketched in.

Sketching Tips 6: Watercolour or not?

Here’s a confession, good people. I’ve never been much good at using watercolour. There, I’ve come clean. I am so jealous of those people who, with a few brush strokes, can transform an ordinary black and white outline sketch into something with depth and beauty. I can’t. 

However, this doesn’t mean that I don’t try, and maybe I’m kidding myself, but I do think that I’m improving. If I show you what I think as some failures and successes, and draw what advice I can from them, then hopefully you might agree.

* What have I learned?

1) Don’t be afraid of colour

Compare this sketch which I made in 2016 : -

With this sketch of the same piece of sculpture from 2018

The later sketch is better drawn in the first place. It has a more appropriate use of detail, and the angle is far more dramatic for the viewer. But even allowing for that, the colours are so much more vibrant on the bottom sketch, while those on the top one look weak and washed out. Generally it’s better to go too bright, rather than too watery. I didn’t leave the large areas of white negative space in the bottom picture either, and this seems to have worked better for me.

2) You can use colour to unify disparate elements in a page in our sketchbook.

Now have a look at these two pages made during a solo sketch crawl: - 

                                                                                               
Now, as individual sketches I didn’t feel that there was anything drastically wrong with either page. But the sketch elements have not been linked together at all. Compare them with these two pages, made literally a couple of weeks later: -

Colour here is the linking principle between the disparate elements of this sketch made in the Waterfront Museum in Swansea. On a slightly smaller scale, this sketch from the Swansea tramshed museum works with colour in a similar way: - 

 3) It can make a huge difference the kind of paper that you use.

One of the difficulties of making these colour sketches was that I’d been using my sketchbook to do so, and while it’s great for ink sketching, it makes it harder to use watercolours than it should be, since the paper tends to resist, meaning that you don’t get anything like an even spread of paint off the brush. So if you are considering trying to add watercolour to an ink sketch, you might do well to make your sketch on watercolour paper. For example, compare: -

This is a sketch from Gower Heritage centre made in my sketchbook. Compositionally I think it’s great, but apart from a few areas it still looks washed out. I had the devil’s own job painting in the cockerel’s brown feathers, for example. Since struggling with this I’ve always tried to use more appropriate paper if I have any intention of adding colour to a sketch. 

4) You can get better results using minimal ink lines, and using different tones to create shading. 

Now this: -

-is a sketch that I made in Kaunas, Lithuania, and it’s one of very few sketches where I think that I was close to achieving what I was trying to do with line and wash. I think that this can be ascribed to the fact that I knew that I wanted to make this a line and wash picture, so I consciously cut down the amount of detail that I put in with the pen. I left the shading for the paint.

Tips 5) How much detail is too much? How much is enough?

When people comment on my sketches, they are more likely to comment on the amount of detail in them than anything else. There’s no doubt that I’m a novice when it comes to simplifying a scene to try to describe it accurately in as few lines as possible. When it comes to detail I often lay it on with a trowel. This is often not a conscious decision, it just happens when I make sketches. Sometimes I’m lucky enough that it works. Other times, not so much. 

Here’s a couple of sketches from 2017 where I think that the amount of detail works to the detriment of the overall picture.

This one I made in Alicante Airport. It’s not a very good rendition of the scene in the departure lounge because it’s far too busy, and there’s too much detail in the background, which distracts your eye away from the figures in the foreground, which should be what the sketch is all about. If I did it again, I’d pay  far more attention to the figures, and include more detail, and then just use some vague outlines with no shading at all for the background.

This one has the opposite problem. It shows the Charles Bridge in Prague, and it’s just not busy enough. It’s little more than an outline. There’s a very vague suggestion of some of the brickwork and some silhouette figures on the bridge. But that’s it. To be fair, it was a very cold day in Prague, and after the ten minutes or so it took to get this far, I was just frozen and my fingers were numb, so I stopped, and I never found the right time to go back and complete it.  

This is another one which is just too busy. This is the Domkirche, the Cathedral in Berlin. I caused my problems for myself by sketching it so large, which didn’t leave much room for anything else. If I’d had a smaller cathedral in the centre of the page, that would have given me more room to very lightly sketch in what was around it, which I think would have worked a lot better. 

Detail isn’t the be all and end all. Here’s the very first sketch I made with a specialist sketching pen.

When I made this sketch it was something of a eureka moment. To me, this isn’t at all detailed. There’s a lot of simplification gone on, and the shading isn’t very subtle. Yet when I look at it, I see St. Katherine’s Church. I even think the simplicity of the foliage in the background works. 

This is just my observation, but I think that the eye tends to be drawn to the areas of a sketch where there is the most detail. Now, there’s no rule that says that you have to try to make your reader focus on the dead centre of your sketch. You may want to offset the main focus towards the right, left, top, bottom. But if you have a very detailed area away from where you want the viewer to focus, it is going to drag their attention away. If you have competing areas of detail, this can make it difficult for the viewer to know where to look in order to ‘decode’ your sketch. So let me show you what I think is a far more successful ‘busy’ sketch. 

If you were to cut this vertically down the middle, then you’d see that there’s far more detail on the left half than the right. In fact your eye should be drawn to the most detailed area, the two figures in the foreground, and the bridal shop they are passing. This is because this is the ‘story’. The two people are my son in law and my daughter, who had just become engaged – it was serendipitous that we passed a bridal shop, and I asked them to walk past it a few times while I sketched their figures. Then I let them go, and I sketched in everything else. Your eye is led down the street by the way that the details on buildings and figures further along the street becomes less clear as you go further along the street. I wanted to show a glimpse of Cardiff Castle on the other side of the street, but kept the road blank, the trees in silhouette, and the castle with minimal shading so that they are never a distraction.

More traditionally, this next sketch places the centre of attention clearly in the centre of the page. This is Dylan Thomas’ Boathouse at Laugharne. The danger I found when sketching it was that the most detailed part of the sketch is actually on the bottom left hand where the wooden beams and railings are by the side of the house. This was in danger of pulling the viewers’ attention downwards, so I used quite heavy shading on the opposite side, and sketched in a lot more detail of the bushes around the bottom and the right hand side than I might otherwise have done, which balances the railings, and hopefully keeps the viewer’s main attention on the house. You might compare the bushes with the dearth of detail in the wall on the top right hand corner, and the sea and shoreline on the left. 

Both of these demonstrate that while you might not have much control over what elements have to be in your sketch, you do have choice over the amount of detail that you use. You can get surprisingly good effects by combining very detailed areas, with areas which aren’t more than outlines. 

* When you’re in the early stages of making your sketch, look at the scene you’re sketching, and think carefully about the areas which need more detail, and those which would be better sketched in more lightly. Too much detail can be confusing to the viewer, too little can also be confusing, and may not engage the viewer’s interest.

The last sketch is one where I feel that I got the balance right. The most detailed area of the sketch is the Altes Museum entrance in the background. Everything else becomes lighter as you move closer to the reader, and further towards both edges of the sketch. The tree trunk on the right, for example, is hardly there at all.

Tips 4 Figures as part of a scene

Sketching Tips 4: Figures as part of a scene.

I think that a really good urban sketch can capture a moment in time and tell a story at the same time. Including figures in your sketches can help turn a scene into a story. I’m not talking about those sketches where you are just focusing on a figure, or a couple of figures – that’s something we’ll come to in the fulness of time.

When you include figures in your sketches you could choose to use:-

* Silhouettes

In this first picture, all bar one of the figures is a silhouette. I decided to give the other figure a white top for a little bit of variation. In this sketch the silhouettes give movement and life to the picture, and also add scale to the building behind it. The building itself is so lightly shaded that the silhouette figures make a real contrast, and contrast can help create drama and impact. Silhouettes are a good way of capturing a figure. Figures move, and they don’t always return to the same position. It can be really difficult to capture a figure if you don’t have a technique. Each of these figures was just a very quick outline impression, where I was more concerned with capturing stance or movement than perfect anatomical proportions. Each outline was shaded in later.

* Outlines

In the second picture the figures are mostly just outlines. These are as quick to sketch as silhouettes, but rather than shading the whole figure in, I just added a few lines to suggest clothing, bags etc. Again, there’s contrast between the figures and the statue base, because the statue base is far more intricate and detailed. The point of these figures was really just to suggest the crowd around the statue, so total accuracy, and shading just wasn’t necessary for them.

* Figures in perspective

In this picture the largest and lightest figures look close to the viewer, while the darker and smaller ones look further away. You can see that this one combines silhouettes and outline sketches. I went like the clappers with the couple in the foreground to get them in outline before they passed by, as I think that they add a real element of story to it.

* The ‘monk’ picture

I thought for a while before I included the monk sketch. The reason why I hesitated is because in this sketch the monk doesn’t so much add to the story, he IS the story. But I included it as it’s a good example of techniques I want to talk about. Every now and then you will just be in the right place at the right time to capture a moment. This happened with my monk picture above. I was visiting Prague in April of 2017, and crossing the Charles Bridge at about 9 am this morning I was passed by this chap. I whipped out my pen and book, and sketched the outline of his figure as quickly as I could. Whether he was a real monk, or involved in something for the tourists, I couldn’t tell you. After he’d gone, I sketched the chap with the hood up on the far right, who was walking towards me. After he’d gone, I put  in the couple between him and the monk, who just happened to be walking slowly enough for me to do so. So actually, all of these figures were sketched from life, but they weren’t all there at the same time. It’s a composite sketch – honest to the scene in as much they did all walk across the bridge within let’s say 30 minutes of each other, although this exact scene didn’t quite happen in real life. It’s a representation of half an hour on the bridge, rather than a caught photographic moment.

When I felt I’d sketched enough figures to make a nice composite group, only then did I start sketching the bridge details around them – I could afford to wait and take my time since these things  weren’t going anywhere in a hurry. It is deliberate that all of the larger figures, other than the monk, are walking towards us, while he’s walking away from us – a man walking against the tides of time, if you like. 

As with most other things, I tend to feel that incorporating figures into your sketches is something you get better at the more you can practise it. Boiling it down to basics:-

* There are good reason for putting figures into your sketches. They can add life, movement, drama, and turn a tableau into a story.

* If you are going to include figures, then it does have implications for how you make your sketch. Silhouettes you can put in at any time, after you’ve sketched in buildings, backgrounds etc. However if you’re going for outline figures, or anything more complicated, you’re probably better off sketching the figures in first. The buildings and backgrounds will still be there when you’re ready, the figures probably won’t.

* You have to find a way of working very quickly with figures, which works for you. I find that whatever type of figures I’m doing, I always start with an outline. Practise this, and you might like to even try drawing outline figures without looking at your paper, or looking away from the figure in front of you. You won’t get perfect figures this way, but it’s a good practise exercise to help you make quick, fluid outline sketches. Once you’ve got an outline, you can decide how much detail, if any, you want to put inside it.

* You’re not trying to create a perfect, photographic image. You’re not going to be able to quickly sketch in more than a couple of figures in one go. That’s fine. As figures come and go, pick and choose which you want to include in your scene, and build it up. The more you try and do this, the more naturally it will come to you when you start building up a scene.

Tip: Putting things into perspective can create dramatic sketches

I’ll have to be a bit careful what I say here. In a way, I’m not a very good person to discuss using perspective in your sketches, since I don’t have any real system for using it, I just rely on my eye to create the sightlines I’m going to follow. So this blog entry is really making me think about how I do it. . . and it’s never a bad thing to spend a bit of time analysing your own technique. 

What Is Perspective?

Perspective is the way that the objects in a  two dimensional image seems to narrow as they recede into the background. Use of perspective can make a flat, two dimensional image seem much less flat and more three dimensional. For example, compare these two early sketches I made in 2016: -

Now, there’s nothing technically wrong with the sketch on the top, which shows the side of the Pierhead Building of the National Assembly in Cardiff. It’s as technically accurate as I’m ever likely to be. But it’s very flat, and uninteresting, which is wrong, since the Pierhead is a very interesting building. Bonmarche in Swansea is an interesting building too, although nothing like the scale of the other. By positioning myself some distance to the left of the shop, rather than directly in front of the shopfront, I was able to use perspective to give an idea of the building in its entirety, which I feel is a lot more interesting than the other sketch. 

It's probably easier to talk about perspective if I use a sketch example. Here’s a simple sketch of a house block.

You can see the way that the roofline slants down into the centre of the page, while the bottom of the block slants upwards towards the centre. Now, if you were to extend both of those lines, then there is a point where they would meet, which we can call the vanishing point. Now, if I was also to draw lines from the tops of the windows, and the bottoms, if the perspective is right, they should also meet at the vanishing point.

Now, if I draw the other side of the street, I could position the block about the same distance from the vanishing point. However, if I move it further away, then the sightlines will be shallower. If I move the other block closer to the vanishing point, then the sightlines from the vanishing point would be much steeper, and the perspective more dramatic.

I do know people who like to set their vanishing point and sketch in sightline very thinly in pencil, then rub them out later. Personally, I don’t go to all that bother. I’m not trying to produce perfect photographic reproductions in my sketches. If I’m trying to portray a building with particularly dramatic perspective I may put a small dot on the page to represent the vanishing point if it’s on the page, but I draw my sightlines just with my eyes. More often than not the vanishing point is past the edge of the page, though.

None of the sightlines on the three sketches were made using a ruler or straight edge. So it’s no surprise that none of them are actually perfectly straight. However, they’re straight enough, and the perspective is true enough to give me the effects I want, and perspective I want. It’s a matter of practise, and being bold enough to experiment. Try to always think where you want to put the vanishing point, and the effect this will have on the viewpoint of the building. For example:-

Here’s the sketch prior to applying watercolour to it: -

See how far to the left the vanishing point would be. Probably not as far as you think. Actually, the perspective isn’t perfect on this – the lines between the bottom and the windows is a little too steep. One thing you might notice, though, is how low the vanishing point is. Using such a low vanishing point was a conscious decision, because I wanted to give the feeling of the viewer, looking up at the Theatre from further down the hill. It’s a derelict building, but the dramatic perspective works to give it a sense of the faded grandeur I eel every time I pass the building.