Today was the final exercise of the 60-day Classical Architecture challenge, and for the last drawing I chose the Colosseum in Rome. The aim was synthesis: to bring together some of the things I’ve been working on over the last few weeks — proportion, rhythm, mass, shadow, simplification and, above all, deciding what to leave out. I started with a fairly detailed pencil construction, as I usually do. Once the structure was established, I rubbed most of the pencil away and began building the drawing in ink with the Sailor Naginata Concord. For the washes I used Cerulean Blue, Buff Titanium, Quinacridone Sienna and Ultramarine Blue. The pencil contained considerably more information than I eventually put into the drawing. That was deliberate. The challenge was to use the pencil to work things out, then decide which information actually deserved to survive in ink. I have shown the different stages of my process: preliminary (pencil and ink); final, pencil, ink and wash.
The Concord worked particularly well for this. The broken, slightly uneven line allowed me to suggest the repeated arches and columns without trying to describe every one of them completely. The wash then did much of the work of establishing the depth and shadow. I spent considerably longer on this than I had intended — probably close to two hours. So much for quick urban sketching. I’m pleased with parts of it, but I can also see where it falls short. The lower arches become a little repetitive, and the foreground is less resolved than I’d like. I was tempted to keep working on it, but eventually decided that the next marks were more likely to make it worse than better. That may actually be one of the better lessons to finish the challenge with. Stop when the drawing has said enough.
Score — 7.5/10 I was hoping for something higher than in the seven’s but 2 months of daily sketching shows you cannot become an urban sketcher overnight …
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