Day 13 – Sydney Opera House

The Challenge

Day 13 was the Sydney Opera House and the instructions sounded simple enough: use one fountain pen and my normal watercolours, draw the Opera House rather than a diagram of it, and keep the wash restrained. There was also an additional rule that at least 40% of the page had to remain untouched, with no splatter simply because an empty bit of paper was looking lonely. The Reasonable Tyrant was not looking for architectural accuracy but for confidence, simplification and rhythm — particularly whether those repeated sail shapes felt as though they belonged together. Finally, I was supposed to stop when the drawing was finished rather than when I had run out of things to add. Yeah Right! 

The Sketch

This was supposed to be a practice sketch. Unfortunately, halfway through I started to like it and persevered to the end. I am not naturally drawn to lots of colour and generally prefer monotone work, but on this occasion I used watercolour and, despite subconsciously ignoring a fair proportion of the instructions, I was pleased with the result. The repeated sails were the real challenge: there is enough similarity between them that getting one badly wrong could upset the rhythm of the whole building. The exercise also reinforced something that keeps cropping up in this challenge — leaving untouched paper is not the same as leaving something unfinished. Sometimes the white paper is doing part of the drawing for me.

The Verdict – Despite the rather casual relationship between the instructions and what actually happened, this worked. The sail forms have enough rhythm and variation to read convincingly as the Opera House without becoming a careful architectural rendering. The drawing has energy and confidence, and the restrained areas of colour work better because they are surrounded by untouched paper. Where it begins to lose some of that confidence is when I continue working an area after it has already said enough. That familiar temptation to add another line, another wash or another bit of information is still there. The lesson from Day 13 was therefore less about drawing the Sydney Opera House and more about recognising when a sketch has already done its job. 
Score: 8.4/10. Where the .4 came from I have absolutely no idea.
Reasonable Tyrant’s instruction: When the sketch has said what it needs to say, stop talking.

I particularly like that final instruction for this one because “learning when to stop” is becoming one of the recurring themes of the entire first challenge.