Part 3 Project 5 Townscapes Exercise 1

This drawing is out of sequence as it has taken me a long time to be able to come up with a place where I could sit comfortably to draw. In Cotonou, it is probably extremely unwise as a White female to sit on the street and sketch. Not only do you stick out like a sore thumb due to the tone of your skin, but people just don't sit around sketching. I know I would draw a crowd of onlookers. It is also swelteringly hot outside with a high humidity level that makes it draining to sit outside. So, instead, I opted to sit in an air-conditioned foyer in one of the buildings at our school. There are only two windows which don't have nasty burglar bars, and this was one of the ones that I sat at.

This foyer is normally a hubbub of activity as classes come and go to the French, Intensive English class and my husband's classroom, but as today is Easter Monday, it is quiet and reposed. Although I love the relative neatness of this particular school campus, I can't say that I have any particular emotional connection to it, other than it is my place of work.

The scene through the window is a contrast between the very stark boring buildings of the office block, and the bright cheerful colors of the flowering shrubs and pot plants, which line the pathways and the edges of the buildings. It is also a contrast between the attempts at neat clean lines and the fact that there are air-conditioners attached at random intervals to the walls. You have this tension between the desire to pull off a neat office block, but the reality that nothing is built particularly straight around here.

During my initial studies, the sky was cloudy, so I had periods of stark sunshine when the walls simply radiated heat and then periods where it was muted in tones. When the sun did break through the clouds it shone directly on the façade, creating a definite patterned shadow of the roof on the white walls.

Detail studies of burglar bars and air-conditioning unit.

As the walls are well plastered and painted in stark white, there is no evidence of the brick work below. The details which are particularly evident are the air-conditioning units and the patterns of the burglar bars over the windows. For this reason I did my 10cm square studies of these two elements.

Preliminary sketch 1: As I was drawing the Director's doorway, I chose to stick down as my underlying layer a page from the QSI newspaper which has all of the names of the various QSI schools and the directors of each. If you look carefully, you can make out some of the names, I then layered a thin wash of yellow, green and cream in the areas where these would be appropriate.

Sketchbook study 1

I commenced working this sketch from the foreground and then worked backwards. I used a mixture of media from differing grades of pencil, markers and watercolor crayons. I don't think that I was able to achieve a sense of depth very successfully as the detail of the foreground gets lost in the greys of the pencil work in the middle ground. Using the newspaper as the base also meant that it was hard to get a clean white wall surface without actually painting white acrylic paint in a fairly concentrated form. I think that the shading around the doorway worked fairly well, it is worked a little less tightly than I normally employ. I do not like the placement of the lamppost directly in front of the hibiscus plant. So, I will try to tweak the positioning of this lamp. I like it, but it just doesn't work here.

Working from the foreground backwards meant that it was difficult to work washes in the background without working over the foreground layer. For this reason, when embarking on the second sketch, I reversed the order and worked the background first.

Preliminary sketch 2: For this sketch, I also did not put down a sketch of the main shapes. Instead, I washed patches of washes in the general position of where I thought the color would be necessary. I then worked from the background first. I worked on the two windows in between the two building blocks. The angle of the windows were slightly slanted downwards, which in the end created a very strange warped perspective. I then worked on the left-hand side building with the air-conditioning unit. I particularly liked the way the charcoal and watercolor washes worked in delineating the roof area and its shadow. I then worked on the Director's office area. I think the door area worked well in that it is not incredibly detailed and helps to create a slight sense of space. I also like the way the plants turned out. I used watercolor markers and charcoal for this area.

It was at this stage that I realized that the building block was horribly out of proportion and I could not fit in the three windows that the façade has. So, I resorted to including only two. As I had to add to the building, the wash of this section was not the same tonality. So lacks the warm radiance of the rest of the building.

I worked the pathway with a mixture of watercolor markers and watercolor crayons. I think the path on the right worked out well, mimicking the surface of the pathway. However, my perspective is really off, as this section of the path should meet up with the path on the left-hand side of the row of bushes on the left. If you know this area, you would feel that I had done an Escher on my perspective. This is an area that I will need to work on for my final sketch. 

The lamppost in this sketch does have a sense of being in the foreground, but I still think that somehow I need to move its position so that it is not central to the picture. The "Director" signage is also more dominant than I think it needs to be. I also eliminated some of the pot plants that I thought were not necessarily adding to the picture.

Sketchbook study 2

Final Sketch: For this final sketch I drew on A3 size paper. I tweaked the composition slightly to have the lantern a bit further over to the right, allowing the director's door to be a little more obvious. I also reintroduced some of the pot plants in the foreground. 

This time around I did a more careful study of the linear perspective to try to counteract the optical distortions of my previous picture. What I found so interesting was that despite my attention to angles and linear perspective, the building still appears warped. On discussing this with my husband, he pointed out that the building really does look warped. The lines of the windows between the two building blocks do slant downwards at a disproportionate angle.

For this drawing, I started with the sky, and decided to include the ugly power pole with its scrappy wiring, in order to give a better sense of place to the building. I noticed that the sunlight on the building was giving the shadows a slight warm yellowy glow, so included this in my initial washes of diluted acrylic paint.

I keep endeavoring to work in a looser more dynamic manner, but as I am so interested in detail, my pictures tend to become controlled by detail. To counteract that I tried to loosen up my interpretation of the foliage. After applying a wash of color, I would work in a fairly loose fashion with black watercolor pencil and watercolor fine markers. I would then wash over portions of the drawing to blend the colors in a more organic fashion. I think this approach helps to counteract the tight lines of the building and its air-conditioners.

Final study for this exercise.

It is interesting to me that you can create three different drawings, with slightly different emphases and different feelings, from exactly the same spot. My first drawing was more claustrophobic due to the fact that I zoomed in to the area between the two buildings and cluttered the space with details of the pot plants and air-conditioners. Whereas, my last drawing has a greater sense of space, but the space is constricted due to the placement of the pot plants in almost a line, breaking up ones imagined travel down the path. So, they form a barrier to the approach of the Director's door. The composition seems to teeter on the axis created by the lamppost. The main features form an inverted triangle, tottering around the point of the base of the lamppost.