These drawings are of Scotland, where I stayed for a few days in my Christmas holidays. I thought that it would be a fun place to draw, since I have never been there before and had plenty of ideas of what it would look like - old, less shiny than the cities I'm used to in North England, and I think for the most part I was right.
One of the first things I saw (on my way to where I was staying from the train station) was this building, which I think was a school. The silhouette of the tree in front of the building and the darkness all around it really made it stand out for me, so I came back the next day to try translating it to paper. I felt that using black paper would help to put emphasis on the shadows and negative space around the building , an dI used white pencil crayon to capture the lines and lit up parts of the building. I think that maybe having some white gel pen and perhaps some white paint could help to make it stand out even more, but I think that this approach has worked quite well the get the creepy, foreboding feeling I was going for.
This next drawing was of an alleyway that I spotted while walking around the city. It felt very creepy, but had some nice architecture. I used graphite to try to get some good contrast going on, but the alley doesn't look as dark as it did when I saw it; the perspective of the drawing leads you straight to the back wall, but the wall wasn't as defined as that and could have almost looked like it wasn't there if not for the windows. I still think it looks interesting though, especially with the gate in front that would box you into the dead end.
I didn;'t actually know what the National Museum of Scotland was when I passed it - I just knew that it had a really interesting shape. It almost looked like a piece of art dropped in the middle of the city, with a museum then carved into the inside of it. I used charcoal to get the thick dark lines of the shape as they were what made the whole building interesting to me, and I feel like the wonky perspective of the other building I drew next to it actually helps to give it that strange, almost unreal look that was what made the building interesting in the first place.
The National Gallery of Scotland had some very nice shapes, and I wanted top explore using shadows behind objects to make said objects stand out more, like the shadow behind all of the pillars. While I think this works (and while I really enjoyed it), I think that the blank space in front (which was the plain cement floor in front of the gallery) is slighty offputting and almost takes the gallery out of context, and puts it in some blank pocket of space. I didn't colour it because the markers I was using wouldn't fill all of that space neatly, like the block colour on the stairs in front. I couldn't find any media that would fit in and colour it well, but upon reflection I think I could have maybe tried using some inks to fill it in.
Walking down towards the Christmas markets, I saw the sun hitting the buildings ahead in a way that lit them up and almost made them glow. There were trees in front that were only silhouettes because of the time of the day, but I think I needed more contrast in this and much darker parts of the trees to make them stand out against the houses more. Also the paint on the road is too saturated, and I feel like the way I have painted it (and the amount of grey) doesn't show the curve of the road as well as I would have liked. I used water color for this so that I could get the lighting effects on the building, but I don't think it has worked as well as it could for the rest of the image.
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