Boring Buildings... Fun Colours

August 22, 2013 | Leave your thoughts

 

After my recent time in Barcelona and London (2 cities containing many examples of architecture that I adore) I find it is easy to become uninspired by the average stock of buildings in everyday life… but colour and especially watercolour can make anything fun! So I am determined to make interesting sketches from boring buildings!

Today three constraints (apart from the boringness of the buildings)
1.  the pen I was using is new (a sailor pen that enables variable lines ) and I don’t have a feel for it yet and isn’t flowing properly
2. sitting in a waiting room without any idea of time… so I just start and let the page evolve – ready at any stage to stop
3. I only had 3 watercolour pencils in my bag of very limited relevance to the subject matter (but at least a light, mid and dark tone)

I then added some splashes of wet watercolour on top when I got back to the car… without much consideration of what 3 colours… but I wanted to keep with a limited palette.

One of the things I like about sketching architecture is that you do anything with the colour! (I suppose you can do this with any subject… but as the buildings, natural colour is normally fairly dull it is more a radical artistic license!)

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