Landscapes - Leeds

Leeds was much more familiar to me than the last two places I visited. I got used to it almost as soon as I moved, and I thought it would be fun to draw and find out what sort of things I liked so much about it.

The Christmas markets were up when I started drawing, and I liked that it used a mix of wooden beams and consistent shapes (like at the farm in Stoke), and other more fun little details of every shape. I felt like using ink with a brush pen would help to give it that kind of older feeling that the German markets tend to have, and I think it worked quite well. I like how the lines aren't straight as well, giving it a less commercial, more home/hand made kind of feel. I also enjoyed the typography on the signs, and I feel like it gives the scene a little more context than random nameless stalls.

I like how, in Leeds, if you look down the end of a long street you will nearly always see some sort of large, ornamental building peeking out. I think at the very far end of this street was the Leeds Town Hall. I like the mix between big, important buildings like that and the smaller residential houses that look almost out of place there. I wanted to concentrate on the lines since the perspective was very interesting, and I feel like it made it easier to show distance, and make closer houses stand out. I used a 5mm mechanical pencil for this, to get all of the smaller detail in.

There are always a lot of roadworks and signs around in Leeds, and I like how especially in this scene they lead you further down the street, almost like a racecourse on Mariokart. I used inks to get the lighting right and so that I could layer up color, giving some of the buildings a lot more depth. The bright lighting at the far end of the street also help to make it look a lot more distant, and your eyes are lead very easily into the centre. This was all done from a reference photo, because I knew I wanted to use wet media, and wouldn't be able to wait for all of the layers to dry before starting on the next ones if I was actually painting on the street.

I always see thus building as I walk past, and I always think it looks great. It has an almost post-apocalyptic feel about it when you walk past, as it looks a lot like it is abandoned. I think as well that you don't really get many buildings with this structure anymore either, and I liked the curves of the main part of the building. I tried out pastel for this, and it took a while to get used to hoe the colours worked with each other, and how to get maximum contrast. I think this piece really works from a distance, but up close it is just lacking something...

Alternatively, I would have liked to try using watercolor for this, with maybe markers over the top.

I found some good tree silhouettes again, and with more dark fences blocking the scene in, I felt like it had an interesting mix of the of the things I have tried out in other images for this task, I felt that it would be good to try it out. As every, my watercolours are too saturated which is something I need to work on, but I do like the effect of the fine liners mixed in with it. I like the ink trees, but I feel like I should have maybe used lots of layers of my fine liners, and more messily so that they fit in more with the rest of the image, yet still frame it. I do like how the perspective of the fence leads you in towards the centre of the image though, along with the lines of the buildings above it.