I decided to have another go at this exercise, working a bit larger on A2 paper. I chose a view of some office buildings near where I live and did a very rough sketch on the paper in situ, which was rather difficult as I was sitting in the car in the car park! Anyway, I took a reference photo and then worked on it this morning. I first put in a wash for the sky (watercolour) with ultramarine blue, purple and a bit of red, very heavily diluted. I then roughly put in the colours for the buildings using lots of water with a largish round brush (Daler Rowney Aquafine Round). I used a tiny portable pan watercolour set and blended greens, red and yellow ochre to get the colours of the buildings and blue mixed with red and green to get the shadow colours. I tried to make this as loose as I could.
I did a bit more work with charcoal and Tomwbow brush pens to try and make the building shapes a bit more believable.
Notes:
I noticed that whilst I was making this study, I seemed to work from dark to light – maybe I subsconsciously took that from the workshop we did over the weekend!
Another point to remember when working from reference photos of buildings is that the buildings tend to ‘bow’ at the sides, which is a distortion of the photographic plane I think. Kinda like a fish-eye effect. The buildings on the right seem to be leaning over to the right. I don’t think this happens when doing a study of buildings in situ.
