drawanyway.com

I used to baulk slightly when it came to drawing buildings. It seemed a little like drawing a painting: the art (in this case, architecture) had already been created. What was I doing trying to duplicate that?

Of course, this is a deeply flawed way of thinking. A picture of a building is quite a different prospect to the building itself. Yes, ok, a carefully-observed, faithful depiction of a structure might convey nothing more than an architect’s drawing would, but there’s so much more you can do.

For starters, you can add in something of how the building makes you feel. If it’s immensely tall, and you are staring up at it, ant-like, you can emphasise that with the angle you draw it at, and a bit of exaggeration. Or if it’s threatening, you can make it darker, add dark skies, shadows, whatever you please, to get your point across.

The architect himself was restricted to building materials such as concrete or brick - you have no such bounds. Will you draw a blotty ink rendition, or a hazy pastel one? And while the architect rather had to make sure he included every window and all four walls - or questions would surely have been asked - no-one will bat an eyelid if you miss out a few for the sake of your overall picture.

Our view of a building is dictated by where we stand, and that is often not a free choice, but one imposed on us by the cityscape. But again, as an artist, you have the choice of framing your picture so it zooms in tight or out to give a wide view.

In other words, drawing a building is much like drawing anything else, except, they’re on such a huge scale that you can really enjoy trying to convey their majesty or dominance or strength, just as you would if tackling a mountain scene or seascape.

Note, for those of you who may have missed it on Saturday:

I’m going to make some changes to Draw Anyway. You might have noticed that recently the whole idea of daily tasks has kind of fallen by the wayside, partly because I get the impression that a task a day is just too much to expect from people. So I’m going to tweak the format slightly. I’ll be posting daily, as usual, but with a mixture of tips, advice and thoughts rather than directed tasks. Then there will be a weekly task set each Saturday. This gives you a whole seven days during which to consider it and tackle it, then come here and post your work.

As ever, do let me know what you think.