Townscape

For my townscape I decided on Birmingham, and ended up at the Ikon gallery. Since the exercise asked me to focus on a specific building, I decided that the architecture of the gallery’s exterior was perfect and sat down to begin sketching.

1. Sketchbook Drawings

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I focused on a small areas above the entrance which showed the roof line and the windows. I love how this looks and it helped me get to grips with depicting the architecture. It was heading to the evening, so the sun was getting low and casting interesting shadows onto the round turret at the entrance. I found this building to be interesting, lots of details and windows, I wanted to explore a complicated building for this exercise to really test my skills and hopefully improve. I think I prefer my tonal approach to this drawing as it captures more texture with the 3B pencil and the grain of the paper.

I tried a new angle with this quick 10 minute sketch, I was limited from angled to choose from due to the tight space around the gallery. I kept a focus on line with this drawing in order to focus on getting accurate proportions with my drawing and I think I have achieved that. I was happy with how this came out, but I preferred the focus from the front, where I could capture all of the details and the layout of the windows. I think it was more interesting and i wanted to explore that composition with ink.

2.Study of a townscape using line

Since the layout of my chosen composition didn’t work well horizontally and was a tall composition, I stuck to one page for this study rather than two. I used line and focused on the shapes and proportions. I still applied tone to the main focal point of the Ikon gallery, and kept the other building in my composition very simple and basic showing the lines that made up its basic composition but no more. I thought this would help to showcase and depict the surroundings while not taking away from where I wanted the focus to be. I only kept to drawing the buildings, but I feel I could have added more detail and texture in the surroundings, especially the courtyard at the front with the gravel. I didn’t at the time to keep the focus on the buildings, but I feel this could have helped create a more interesting and dynamic drawing. I know for my final piece, I want to explore this composition but keep the focus higher, like in my original 10cm square drawings, but I would like to try and include the building on the left, and experiment with keeping that in minimal detail compared to the main building.

3. A limited palette study

For my tonal palette I experimented with sepia tones, using browns, and black ink to draw. I used walnut ink for my brown tones, layering the ink for darker browns. Black ink for the darkest shadows and to add fine details, and I used the absence of ink on the white paper to add in white highlights. I knew the white window frames would be where I would want to have these highlights and so I left them blank. By layering the brown I was able to capture the texture of the roof and some of the brick work.
I am happy with how the main building of the gallery came out, however I do not like my minimal approach to the side building. In hindsight I could have improved this by layering the browns to add some depth, as it looks too basic and has no depth and takes away from the drawing as a whole. To improve, although I wanted the focus to be on the main building, I shouldn’t have taken this much away from the side building. I should apply some attention to the tonal value as this just doesn’t work well at all. I think the loose approach to the clouds works quite well to develop a dynamic background that also works well with the gallery and drawing as a whole.

Moving forward

I struggle with developing townscape compositions and this is something I need to work on and improve on. I tried a stylistic approach and it needs some work to progress to something more visually stimulating, I want it to be much more immersive and to do that I need to capture the rest of the environment perhaps at a larger scale, in a range of tone to build up a believable and interesting space.