Wednesday, February 6, 2008

A Window Downtown


Almost every day I find a reason to go down to the large hardware store in our town and on the way I pass this large brick tenement building of four stories and in one of the upper windows there is a row of potted flowers. I have been meaning to do a drawing of a row of windows on the top floor of this building but first I drew this detail of the window with the flowers.

Almost all the drawings I have posted have been done with various sorts of pencils, but this is one of those drawings which has been done with the brush. When you draw the leaf of a plant with a pencil, first the pencil point runs down one side of the leaf, then the other side. After that you might go back and shade in the shape. When you draw the leaf of a plant with a brush, the left side if the bristles draws the one side of the leaf, and the right side of the bristles draws the other side, meanwhile as you make the stroke the tip fills in the middle, and a kind of tremor of the fingers variegates and details the shaded part. All this can be seen in the stroke of the brush if you take a careful look.

Some people will say to me, “You know Richard, the detail is better than the whole drawing!” To which I can only reply, that’s probably why I just drew the window and not the whole building.

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