Kedleston Hall Sketches

Sorry, things have been a little quiet here lately... been a bit busy doing architectural work and no leisure for architectural sketching!


So here are the sketches that i did during a few hours visiting Kedleston Hall last September.As it was sunny when I arrived I went and sat in the grass at the rear and at the front of the house to quickly sketch the exterior.

Then I went inside and was very surprised that I was allowed to paint inside! It was also special chat to numerous staff members including the curator a number of times - the last time all about Palladio!! What a treat!!! If you want to sketch during a great house visit you must work very fast or else you need all day... and I had another house to visit that day.

My final sketch was in the saloon - this sketch which was done very quickly and rather than being a literal view of the room is a distorted diagram which captures the essence of the room -the dome, the pattern of the dome, the alternating trianglar and semi-domed niches and the urns contained within the niches. I can fully construct an image of the room in my head as a result of this sketch.

This kind of abstraction is something I want to explore further - part diagram/ distorted perspective - in order to describe a complex space in a single drawing.

A discussion about perspective

Last week I posted this sketch to my flickr with the idea of making sketching perspective on location simpler. The main intent is to sketch a simple building on a flat site without having to establish the vanishing points (which are often off the page of your sketchbook) (click on photo to access the explanation)
What happened on my flickr was an amazing discussion about 3 point perspectives... leading to a wonderful method by wernerk - not for the faint hearted but it appeals to the mathematical side of my brain!

and then Gerard Michel (the master of perspective) shared this amazing technique...which has all to do with moving the page of your sketchbook up to your eye (having one eye closed) and drawing parallel lines... took me a while to figure it out....
Click on the photos to go to full explanations.

Meanwhile I have been having fun lately sketching contour drawings and abandoning perspective all together!!!

A quick 'paper' exercise based on photos I took last year in Rome (Borromini is naturally one of my favourite architects!)

Quick sketches done in 30 minutes before going to a sketching event in the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney.