Eilean Donan Castle

You may recall from my last post that I did a practice piece of this castle a few weeks ago. Since then I've been working on the drawing proper. This is much larger than I usually work (on 16" x 12" Daler-Rowney Heavyweight paper) and it's surprised me as to how much longer a large drawing takes compared to a smaller one. I suppose it should have been obvious but there's a lot of little pen marks in this drawing. A picture twice the size seems to have taken 8 times longer to do.

Another 'first' for me was that I used several reference photo's. With shadows, lack of colour and a flat grainy photograph I found some of the details difficult to put into perspective, but having several photo's taken at different times of day and from different viewpoints enabled me to get a better understanding of how the various walls and buildings fit together.

As I stated in my previous post, this particular view of the castle isn't quite balanced as the bridge runs out too far to the right leaving a large empty space to the right of the castle. I had intended to use artistic licence to insert a tree into that space to balance things up but I've changed my mind and cropped the picture to exclude one of the bridge spans. A few birds in the empty space adds some balance.

I'm really pleased that I did the practice piece (something else I don't usually bother with) as it helped me understand which hatching/shading worked and which didn't. I didn't want to make the hatching obvious and believe that if done right it should blend seamlessly into the whole.

For anyone interested I've put a Work In Progress page on my main website showing the various steps.