Assignment 3: View from a window

It took me quite a while to settle on a subject for this assignment, and I ended up using the most obvious subject available to me - the view of my garden seen from my patio doors.

The garden has a paved part near the door and then steps down to a small lower lawn.

The intention was to show the paving close to the house, with bushes in the middle and far distance.

After several try-out drawings to get the perspective right, I mapped out the drawing with a hard (2H) pencil and then went for watercolour pencils to provide colour. I ran a wet brush over some of the areas to get surafce colours, and then returned with dry pencils to try and introduce more detail.

On the whole, I'm not very happy with the result. The bushes in the middle distance look as if they are at the back of the garden, and the various flowers (mainly daffodils and Christmas roses, which have whitish bell-shaped flowers that hang down) just don't look as they should do.

What have I learned?

I need to do a lot more work on depicting distance through tone as well as through perspective. I also need to speed things up - this drawing took several days, and the previous drawing and preparation tooks a couple of weeks.

Anyway, here's the finished drawing...

An old plane tree in Beckenham

This old plane tree in Kelsey Park, Beckenham, must be more than 200 years old and bears the scars and damage of the years. It is gnarled and obviously one of its major branches broke many years ago but continued to grow at an angle from the main trunk.

I've tried to capture the underlying structure of the plant, with its strong lines running up from the roots and up the trunk.

I drew it from life, despite the cold weather, and found myself surrounded by ducks, geese and pigeons, all hoping I was there to feed them. I also took some pictures to help me fill in some of the details back home in the warm.

I did the main drawing in pencil, and then added some colour using watercolour pencils, although I didn't add a lot of water (except the odd damp finger to spread the colour around a bit).