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.

Hardwick Hall Revisited

The two pages below represent another go at sketching Hardwick Hall. I was there last year and somewhat overwhelmed at the time (in a good way!) by the enormous windows “Hardwick Hall more glass than wall” that I drew the sketch above... Large sketch showing every pane of glass and got so sick of it by the end.

Today I wanted to achieve two things
1. Understand the building BEFORE I sketched it (last year on location I discovered things about the building while I was sketching and wasn’t able to correct my sketch as I was doing it on the run)
2. Find a more expressive way of sketching the building without having to draw every window.
Well I did achieve the first but sadly had a break in time before I sketched the building...so in effect lost the benefit of the analysis...so a number mistakes in the number of panes in the sketch on the first page... This sketch I faded parts of the building according to structure... ie. I started to draw the building from the centreline and faded my linework and colour as I moved out from the centre.

On the second sketch I sketched and painted in response to the light hitting the façade. This was a suggestion of John Haycraft and I am very excited about the possibility of exploring this idea further – following the light across a building.