Leslie’s Art Blog

Bill Guffey’s blog, The Virtual Paintout, utilizes Google Maps Street View, and selects a location every month for artists to use for reference photos.   Belfast, Northern Ireland was chosen for the month of October.

I have thoroughly enjoyed drawing Ireland, and have done this step by step demonstration of one of my drawings titled, “Carrickfergus”.  You can see more of my drawings of virtual Ireland here at Leslie’s Drawing A Day.

The drawing is small, 4.5″ x 6.5″, and is done on a dark taupe colored Alphamat with Derwent Artists colored pencils.   To obtain the reference photo, I actually took a photograph of my computer screen with the location I had chosen on Google Maps, and then printed the photo.

This is a shot of the reference photo printout, and the outline of the drawing done with Chinese White colored pencil on the taupe background. 

These are the Derwent Artists colored pencils I chose for the drawing.

Top to bottom:

• Light Blue
• Ultramarine
• Mineral Green
• Emerald Green
• Imperial Purple
• Venetian Red
• Chocolate
• Raw Sienna
• Zinc Yellow
• Chinese White
• Gunmetal
• Pink Madder Lake

#1.  I draw the general proportions in Chinese White on the Alphamat.  I left out the metal roof that occupies the center of the drawing.  I thought the large light area would be difficult to understand visually.  That area will be ‘garden’ instead.

I left the outbuilding on the right in the drawing, but changed it from a glass greenhouse to a solid white, plastered structure.  All this fiddling comes under the heading of “artistic license”.

#2.  I typically start with white when I am working on a dark background, so I filled in the large areas of white.

#3. I filled the general areas with Light Blue (sky and water), Mineral Green (trees and hedges), Pink Madder Lake (flowers) and Zinc Yellow (one shrub and sunlight on the hedge).   Nothing too detailed at this point.  I just want to indicate where the colors are to go.

#4.  I color the dark areas of the windows with Chocolate, and the chimney with Venetian Red.   The chimney in the photo wasn’t that color, but I thought a “brick” color would add interest, and mimic the color of the door.

#5.  I have erased some of the white outlines that still remained.  They tend to show through the colors, so I eliminate them.  I changed my mind about having a dark window on the small outbuilding on the right.  It was erased.  I added more Mineral Green to define the trees and hedges at the bottom of the drawing, and added Chocolate to the window frames, and shadows under some of the background bushes.

#6.  I re-drew the shape of the chimney.  I had it wrong, and it needed to work structurally.  Lots more layers were added to the sky.  Chinese White, Light Blue, and bits of Ultramarine in the top right corner.  Adding the Ultramarine made the sky appear a different color than the ocean color.  Layers of Zinc yellow went over all the green to add the appearance of sunlight on the greenery.

This is the finished drawing. I added Chocolate color to define the shapes of the shrubbery (nod to Monty Python), and to darken the window shapes. I added more layers generally all over the piece to fill in the texture of the Alphamat and intensify the color.

If you ever have any questions about how I do my drawings, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Happy drawing!

Leslie