Derwent 3B graphite pencil, 50mins, 6-7pm midweek, February.

Having spent the previous hour drawing Macquarie Street, it was time to meet Freddie from Georgia USA and half-a-dozen members of Urban Sketchers Sydney for some twilight sketching near the Opera House. Unlike the boardwalk which was sunny and hot, the forecourt outside the restaurant was windy. We repaired to the Royal Botanic Gardens for a three-quarter view of the Opera House, including the Man o’ War Steps, aware the sun sets at 8.10pm.

I surprised myself yet again by falling into what feels like a new drawing style – working very slowly, very lightly. The view was too big to draw sight-size, so I mentally halved everything. Starting with an horizon line (the water level at Kirribilli), I basically moved from one geometric shape to another. No rash gestures, no rush to tonality. From this view, there are as many strong horizontals as verticals. The ‘base’ on which the House is founded is much more clearly visible from this angle than elsewhere; the mesh of vertical posts at the Man o’ War Steps (as well as the old sandstone gates) allows lead-ins for the eye.

The final result looks fairly insubstantial, but it’s all about filling the page as much as possible (looking more like a study for a painting than a focussed pencil sketch) and getting building proportions down correctly. Much of the House is in fact in shade at this time of day; there was far more interest in the dramatic clouds. It’s obvious why Streeton and the Heidelberg Impressionists loved painting at this time of day from their camping spot at Mosman! The dark chocolates and pale blues inside the shadows within the Opera House sails were pretty delicious though.

Virtuosic watercolour sketches from my colleagues, but for me there’s lot to be said for twilight sketching at the end of a working day!

Derwent 3B graphite pencil; 5-6pm, midweek, Feb 2012.

The start of Year 2 of (Proper) Urban Sketching already feels very different. I’m not sure why, but have suddenly taken to drawing very slowly (almost like blind contour drawing) for 40min stretches (very long by my standards), without rushing into b&w tonality and consciously getting proportion and measurement on my side. The final result looks insubstantial, but I don’t care; there’s plenty of scope to add colour later – my focus is on getting the foundation as correct as possible, even if it looks like it’s fallen off an architect’s desk. I’m reconciling myself to the fact that a lot of urban sketching involves perspective and hard edges – and it would be nice to get buildings looking right! J.M.W.Turner certainly worked on them in his early career – the medieval cathedrals.

This is a view I was keen on from an earlier twilight visit, with the strong contrast of the trees and vegetation to the left (the tail end of the Royal Botanic Gardens) and the unusual architecture of Macquarie Street, from the ‘toaster’ at 1 Macquarie Street on Bennelong Point, through to the Renzo Piano building to the left. The Piano building seems to have emboldened architects with later buildings. Not as enthralled this time round with the view – it wasn’t nearly as dramatic as I’d remembered -, so included more of the Circular Quay buildings. I was very intrigued about being able to fit everything from the Reserve Bank in Martin Place (far left) to Australia Square (far right), with such greats as Customs House and Chifley Square in between.

The process was looser than it seems. Only two real measurements at the beginning: the height of the new AMP building being one pencil-height and the Circular Quay ‘white’ building being half that height. I didn’t even bother with a pencil-width to see how much I should get in across the page. After about 20 structural lines, I laid in the detail. Normally I would have rushed into tonality (too quickly). With the sun setting (this was approx. 5 to 6pm). I will review this work in terms of pen and ink, as well as colour. I seem to have overcome an imperative to produce rushed, overly-dramatic lines.

Public seating on the Opera House boardwalk. Lots of red roses and moody couples about given it’s Valentine’s Day, but I wasn’t disturbed, left to my own devices. I have a vague recollection of being photographed, but my work was completely absorbing!

Why publish a hardcopy when there is an abundance of material on the website, www.urbansketchers.org? As with all hardcopy books, there’s both portability and immediacy: I’m not tied to a PC screen (and all the electrical paraphernalia and methodology associated with access) and it is very close to replicating the real-life artwork since it’s reproduced on paper. Producing a book lends a certain air of respectability to this new take on an old process; urban sketching may have formed the basis of J.M.W.Turner’s urban and landscape work two hundred years ago, for example, but contemporary urban sketching has the edginess of something still just that little bit outside the art canon. It’s by nature democratic and available to all, very often its gestural frantic quality resembles arte povera, lavori biro, folk art or outsider art; urban sketching doesn’t seem easily grasped and held by the fingers of the elite.

It goes beyond the material on the website in its ability to juxtapose material. Three sketches of the same building (e.g. Notre-Dame de Paris) done by three different sketchers for immediate comparison purposes, all lined up on the one page, isn’t possible online.

The book is big (22x26cm and 320 pages) and extremely comprehensive. It’s divided into three sections, the first explaining the concept of Urban Sketching, a very extensive second which is a global journey, city-by-city (the biggest cities get 6 or 8 pages each) and a final section devoted to sketching themes.

The range of approaches and matrial is extremely wide. Work by individual sketchers is scattered through the book; local hero, Liz Steel, has her work in five different spots. 

Urban Sketching has begun to blossom lately into a variety of media forms; there are now video clips on YouTube and short films, complementing photo galleries on Flickr and weblogs of individual sketchers. Notwithstanding having checked the Urban Sketching website myself on a daily basis for the best part of the last twelve months, this hardcopy version is heartily recommended as both a consolidation of website activity and an extension of it. Ideal for libraries.

342 and 344 Swanston Street, Melbourne. RMIT Building.

3B Derwent graphite pencil, A4. 80mins, 10.30-11.50am. Hot and humid.

While not technically my first urban sketching of 2012, it certainly feels like it. There’s a throwback here to my “first” urban sketching 0f 2011, inside the Royal Botanic Gardens Herbarium.

Viewing public and residential buildings in Melbourne from ground level is quite a special experience. Very wide roads allow the viewer to see buildings from considerable distances, something that is lacking in Sydney. There is a “completeness” to the viewing experience. In Europe, you have more variety – some are tightly pressed together, others can be seen in their entirety from a distance. 

What I found very impressive was the amount of ornamentation on Melbourne’s buildings, both old and new. This is probably a response to the unrelenting flatness of the land and the uniformity imposed by a grid street layout. Individual buildings have to break out of this imposed order. There was a time when Melbourne seemed to break the monotony via public sculpture, but architects have taken up the challenge.

Early 21st century architects have adopted strong ornamentation and colour in their work, paralleling the previous use of public sculpture to enliven the environment visually. The number of preserved 19th-century and early 20th century facades, with fancy brickwork still intact, was overwhelming. I’m in the habit of restricting myself to Carlton and the CBD when visiting the city, partly as a throwback to visits to corporate headquarters in Exhibition Street. This was a rare opportunity to walk around Melbourne during the daytime. A walk down Drummond Street and Lygon Street shows how Melbourne seems to have bypassed the modernism of the 1960s and 1970s. So much has been preserved from the past! I’ve not been to Melbourne since Spencer Street Station was made over into Southern Cross with its wave (at least I don’t remember it from 2006) and that’s been added to later in terms of the Etihad Stadium and Docklands redevelopment. Also much of the uniformity of the commercial high rise of the late 1990s has now been fragmented with work on the southern side of the Yarra. I notice even some of the hardest edges of the Stalinist-looking housing commission highrise have gone, the first buildings you see on arrival from the airport (is this Romania?). Docklands looks like it could have been transplanted from Brisbane, but it lends an air of tropicality to an otherwise airless dessicated Australian city.

The RMIT Building of 1995 seemed unique at the time because no-one had introduced colour into building facades on such a scale since the 1890s. It stood alone at the time. As I recall, Melbourne was in recession and city shops, one after the other, were boarded up without tenants. Since then, Melbourne has gone crazy with colour and ornamentation and facades which aren’t flat and parallel to the street. 

I had the choice between dashing around and making thumbnails of all the interesting buildings I saw or one long sketch. I decided on this one since this, for me, is the foundation-stone of Melbourne’s interesting fin-de-siecle (21st century) architecture. The richly coloured facade contrasts with its 19th-century neighbour, the Storey Hall – I merely suggested left this uniformly mid-grey facade since I wanted the focus to be on the unusual fenestration of the 1995 building, which also extends up and over the Storey Hall at the back. There is in fact a “laneway” entrance which becomes a rear laneway proper at the back of Storey Hall leading to LaTrobe Street. I took advantage of some public seating across the road; the plane trees in leaf obscured more of the building than I’d anticipated. Rather more uniform, but still very exciting, is the Swanston Academic Building (construction nearly completed) on the other side of the street. Further along at Victoria Street, a highrise building with indoor rock climbing: a cliff inside a glass-fronted box.

My very light, deliberate style is influenced by some of the examples in the new book by Gabriel Campanario, The Art of Urban Sketching: Drawing on Location around the World. The loving attention to detail in this book, right down to how long sketches took to draw (approximately of course) makes this a very unusual and valuable book.

I’ve left the drawing completely raw while I think about what I might do next. Reference photos provide the yellow ochre, mint greens, burgundy and chrome silver of the facade. I may end up photocopying this on to watercolour paper and doing some colour versions. Having seen recently some watercolour sketchbooks by Australia’s finest watercolourists (Gosford Regional Gallery) and those of John Glover (NGV, History of British Watercolour), I’m sensing an increasingly widening gap between the sketchbook and touching up involving addition of pen and colour later on in the studio. Pen and colour, added later, will obliterate the feel of the original sketch. I’m not so worried that some of the lines won’t translate into a scan for uploading to the Net. I’ve always been worried about the gap, but that’s been reinforced for example by the very wide gap between Tommy Kane’s on-site sketching and finished ‘painting’ back in the studio, involving inks, pen, watercolour, pencils and markers. So much work is done in the studio, transofrming it into a painting, that it can hardly be called on an on-site sketch.

Storey Hall (at right) is now also a RMIT building, the site of the RMIT Gallery. The Gallery feels like the foyer of the Sydney Town Hall, “vertical” as opposed to the “horizontal” of Tamworth Regional Gallery from whence Sensorial Loop, the current exhibition came.  The exhibition moved to Melbourne this week and it’s now Melbourne’s turn now to the flabbergasted by the latest in Australian textile work.

I had the good fortune to visit this Japanese Garden last Spring, during the very short period when the fuji/wisteria were in bloom. The garden took me straight back to Japan, the flow of the strolling shuyu garden and the creation of mini-landscapes of mountains and valleys; it was hard to hold back the tears. This time, in mid-summer, I had none of the overwhelming visceral reaction to the garden. I spent a lot of time walking around the outside of the garden on the foreshore of Caroline Bay (including taking the Friendship Walk) and noting the extent of the ‘borrowed landscape’. so important in appreciating Japanese gardens. 

The view from the Wisteria Walk was out of the sun. The formal clipped shrubs were easy to jot down. More difficult was the architecture of the Koi Pavilion, especially the darks under the roofline. More difficult still was the Cypress Bridge. The Australian Gums had to be included. I added pencil after the watercolour, not before.

“Cold” sketching – sketching something I’ve never seen or sketched before – is always a challenge. Little wonder artists concentrate on subject matter they know intimately and draw/paint again and again.  The Koi Pavilion was the venue this morning for a Naming Ceremony so was crowded. The sunlight was very strong and this was the view looking north to the Pavilion including the Turtle Island from the teahouse. The shadows became prominent geometric shapes.

After retreating indoors to the airconditioned Australian Watercolour Institute Exhibition, a second session began in the Koi Pavilion, looking west. Again, another attempt at understanding the Cypress Bridge. On my next visit to the Garden, I will take a closer look at the roof architecture of the pavilion. Family groups, feeding the koi carp, wandered in and out of the view. Having ‘got my eye in’ after two hours, this was going to the best drawing possible of the day.

I’m averaging four or five sketches per outdoor drawing session these days, a vast improvement on 12 months ago when I was exhausted after a single drawing (at the most two), after less than an hour.  When concentration wanes, I take on ‘impossible challenges’, ’something completely different’ and today’s involving the texture of the black pines. The spiky leaves (pruned along their lower parts) provide the basis for “starbursts” in Japanese art and textiles, “fireworks” at the end of every branch. 

I was very impressed by the many sketchbooks on display as part of the AWI Exhibition. I wanted to see how others combined media, especially with pencil drawing. Most sketchbooks were invariably hand-bound on largely smooth paper; most drawings showed a lot of careful, considered effort – no rash or hasty marks. A lot of attention to detail in built environment landscapes; rather more fluidity of course in landscapes, but, again, a lot of time spent on them, with a lot (if not all) of the picture plane filled. None of the drawings on show will have been completed in less than an hour or two. None were “mere impressions”.

* pocket-size, very small (designed for inconspicuous sketching abroad, e.g. Italy – the Lucca piazza included a lot of pencil detail, very studied and very light, with no tonal work in pencil, all the tone being provided by the paint alone);

* judicious use of watercolour highlights within pencil drawings, not clashing at all with the pencil work (e.g. drinkers at an outside cafe on Oxford Street, Sydney);

* a large sketchbook of watercolour landscape paintings, on thick watercolour paper, by Rick Amor – no pencil drawing but lots of very clear colour – “preliminary” paintings in effect;

* Robyn Norling’s three sketches of a cathedral facade with two concentrating on the poses of people; 

* a large sketchbook page with a very small watercolour miniature in the middle, surrounded by lots of white paper.

* “transitional” work of Jocelyn Maughan – pencil in sketchbook plus single sheets of watercolour (studies for paintings).

The exhibition contained monumental works by Rob Wade, Ron Stannard, Jocelyn Maughan and other watercolour greats. The prices on some virtuosic works were shockingly low, more a statement about how watercolour painting is considered compared to oil painting in today’s market.

8×10″ cut paper stencil

I am preparing a series of stencils for use in the current Strathmore Online Workshop devoted to doodling and mix media and also for use with a 8×10″ Gelli printmaking plate.

Today’s is a series of circular doodles divided into five parts, an idea adopted from five-petalled flowers used in Japanese cut paper stencils as used in yuzen and Kaga yuzen stencil-dyeing of fabric. Overall geometric designs in komon Japanese printed cloth (usually white pattern on dark blue) come in small (tiny patterns) and large (much larger surface designs) – today’s is the large variety.

References

www.strathmoreartiststudio.com – Traci Bautista workshop

http://gelliarts.blogspot.com. Gelli Arts printmaking plate.

Traditional Japanese Stencil Designs. Tokyo, Seigensha.

Three photos, side-by-side here, of Circular Quay, taken from Platform 2 of Circular Quay Railway Station. This would be difficult to sketch in one sitting, since I’m standing up and in full morning sunlight, but it’s theoretically possible if I do it over several sessions perhaps. Splitting the view up into three, as in these photos, one per A4 landscape piece of paper, seems feasible. Theoretically too, one could lean on the guard rail and eliminate the ‘barrier’ altogether.

Here are two photos of the same scene, but obviously lower down (and out of direct sunlight), given I’m sitting on a nearby platform seat. The inclusion of the glass barrier in any sketch doesn’t worry me at all; we are constantly viewing buildings and other vistas “through” fences and safety barriers of one type or another. For many decades this was in fact a brick-and-tile barrier, so things have ‘improved’ with its replacement by glass.

Obviously I felt uncomfortable scribbling in the close company of train commuters, so here’s a preliminary pencil sketch done on-site (with Prismacolor coloured pencils added at home). The pencil sketch was really designed only to see how much detail is able to be captured on a single A4 page. The key question here is: how much detail do I have to eliminate to fit everything on to a piece of paper or a set number of several pieces of paper? Is one aiming for precision in the detail or simply an impression of the panoramic landscape?

Sydney Panorama Drawings

There’s quite a history of drawing and photographing panoramas of Sydney, or creating “Sydney Views”. They seem to have started with Louisa Anne Meredith whose impressions of Sydney were published in the 19th-century; she left a very extensive panorama drawing of Sydney, done in 1840 from Lady Macquarie’s Chair and thought to have been intended to complement her written account of Sydney Town. The original is in the PowerHouse Museum, 97/279/1 (42cm high and 184.3cm long), a complex and comprehensive drawing (with annotations indicating landmarks) in pencil, on some 15 unfolded sheets of sketchbook paper. Later on, a 19th-century panorama was painted on a punch bowl – now in the archives of the Sydney Town Hall.  Both of these were done to publicise Sydney to the outside world. Similarly, Urban Sketchers are today delving into the panorama technique in part to publicise their towns and cities, whether they be San Antonio Texas or Naples Italy.

And panoramas weren’t just made from the southern shore of Sydney Harbour. The Holtermann panorama was a series of photographs taken from Lavender Bay on the North Shore in 1875. The Sydney panorama continues to be a popular subject for photographers to the present day.

Vantage points

The late Margaret Olley was able to paint, in her final year, Sydney Harbour from a high vantage point – a residential apartment. I’m not sure to what extent urban sketchers can access similar: Sydney Eye (Sydney Tower) or the MLC Centre or views from hotels like the Intercontinental. One could book a table at the Forty One restaurant in Chifley Tower or the Summit Restaurant atop Australia Square. There is the Cahill Expressway lookout, accessible by lift from the quay. And the Pylon Lookout, the easterly southern pylon of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Savant Stephen Wiltshire has been able to draw Sydney Harbour from memory, from Sydney Tower, Centrepoint.

References

19th-century: Louise A Meredith – http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/?irn=157941. Starts with Bennelong Point round to Potts Point via Sydney Harbour.

The Holterman panorama, 23 albumen silver photographs, 97.8cm long. http://nga.gov.au/Exhibition/PICTUREPARADISE/pdf/Holtermann.pdf

21st-century: www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk

Sarah Simblet, The Drawing Book. London, Dorling Kindersley Ltd., 2005.

Most drawing books feature the work of an individual author and works, very often drawing “classics”, by others. This is an impressive book, both in its large format (larger than A4 and more than 260 pages) and its comprehensive sweep of contemporary aspects of drawing and sketching. There’s a heady mix of materials, unusual drawings and modern takes on conventional subject matter. Other artists’ drawings she uses are noticeably different from other similar instructional books.  

The initial chapter, covering traditional content such as drawing books and paper, sets the scene for a journey of personal discovery via sketching and drawing. Highlights for me were the accessible sketches of insects in a variety of pen and inks (p.34-37), an excellent chapter on Plants and Gardens and the variety of approaches demonstrated in Architecture. 

Objects & Instruments feeds directly into the trend for object drawing and there you’ll find Composition, Negative Space and Tonality matched with the distinctly innovative such as drawing with wire. The pages on Hands and Feet make you want to draw them, especially if imitating her work in compressed charcoal and ‘bracelet shading’ on toned paper. Modern fashion is included in the chapter on Costume (including a double-spread on shoes!). Abstract Line certainly pushes the envelope, exploring semi-abstraction and collage. It’s traditional to end instructional drawing books with drawing from the imagination and Simblet links this content with brushes and brushwork.

All the traditional genres are there, but there’s a modern twist on them all. An extremely well-disciplined student who follows each of the directives to their logical conclusion (e.g. learning about perspective by drawing imaginary spaces drifting into the distance, or exploring ‘writing time’ or ‘Chants and Prayers”) will benefit enormously from the experience. Those with less rigour will simply be inspired by the munificence of mark making on display.

A book full of passion, exploring the imaginary and the fictitious through drawing.

Here are some Western Grey kangaroos, as featured in the spectacular television documentary on kangaroos, The Roo Gully Diaries (ABC DVD).

The Australian Museum, Sydney. I took a photo of the James Barnet facade of 1864 (his first project as newly-appointed Government Architect) because of the massive stylobate and monumental 14-metre classical Corinthian columns. Like many Sydney buildings, rather more architectural “front” than actual substance!

Further to previous posts of kangaroos, horses and elephants in The Skeleton Room, here are more sketches done during the International SketchCrawl(TM) #34 on 20 January 2012.

Cicadas on Level 2 (Birds & Insects), inspired by the pen drawings of insects by Sarah Simblet, in her book “The Drawing Book”.

Picture windows in the Museum provide views looking north towards St Marys Cathedral, including the Land Titles Office and the Philip+Cook swimming complex, formerly a bowling green belonging to the Sydney Bowls Club.

All manner of stuffed specimens are available for sketching in the Museum’s Discovery Room. Here an Australian Grebe.

Here a kookaburra and a rosella, the overwhelming complexity of which reminded me of the detail of a falcon in one of Holbein’s paintings.

References

Simblet, Sarah. The Drawing Book. London, Dorling-Kindersley, 2009.

Sydney Architecture: http://www.sydneyarchitecture.com/cbd/cbd2-005.htm

www.sketchcrawl.com