Complex buildings are fun - The Louvre

Just going through some old sketchbooks I came across this sketch from my first serious sketching trip in 2009 - 3 weeks in the UK and 1 week in Paris with my great sketching buddy Esther.

This is a rare black and white sketch  - I don't do many of them do I? The reason is that I lost my paint tin on the flight to Paris....but this is really besides the point.


The thing that I want to share is the mud map that I did before attempting the sketch. This was the way that I explored the building for myself  - the way I got to know it. After doing this diagram I found the main sketch a lot easier.... fun!

The more I sketch the less I need to do diagrams like this as I my observational skills develop all the time, but if I am presented with a highly complex building, it is really the only way to get to know.

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.