One Sketch 279) (Saturday 29th December) St. Mungo's Cathedral Glasgow

An oasis of calm and peace
In a city
of
energy

I hope that you can see the influence of Ian Fennelly in this one. I'm not sure that I really like the façade in this one. If you look at Ian Fennelly's work you'll see that although he is playing with form, he does still manage to keep elements of his buildings in proportion with each other, whereas the façade in this just isn't. Live and learn - it's all part of the learning curve. Not totally unhappy with the colours though, although it might have been more effective just to have the colours bleeding and washing out towards the bottom of the façade.

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.

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.