Perspective: Aerial or atmospheric perspective

I did several sketches for the exercise and chose a view from a first floor front window of my house because it has colourful and challenging bushes on my side of an ornamental swale, and young trees on the other side, which I thought would frame the picture.

In doing research for cityscapes I remembered I had a book called “London Sketchbook: A city Observed” by G Byfield in my bookcase. I used this beautiful collection of city scenes in watercolour and pencil as my inspiration, and also as my reference for impressions of bricks, bushes and sky, and for the use of negative space for objects to give a sense of looseness and freshness, such as on window edges, cars etc.

For my support I chose A3 cold pressed watercolour paper, and started with HB pencil but found the outlines too light so I switched to Super Fine Indian Ink pen.

It was difficult to get the proportions and the perspectives of the houses right as my view was an aerial perspective from my first floor window, and the vanishing points were too far out of the paper. To resolve this I used a photo and 4x6 grid to position the houses accurately, but the bushes, the colours and the details I did from life, sitting in the house looking through a glass door.

I chose my watercolour palette and tested various brush sizes for the marks I wanted to achieve.

Things that when well -

I believe the composition works and I like the car as a focal point, which I left as negative space and which I think looks interesting. I also think I managed to get the sense of distance on the roof of the house at the back by lightened the grey colour, and made the trees behind the houses recede by using a light mixture of blue and green.

Thing that when badly -

Unfortunately the week I was working was overcast and quite grey, so there were no strong shadows, which was a shame. As soon as I finished we had a sunny day and there were nice, strong shadows on the roof and the walls, which weren’t there before. As I used watercolour it would have been difficult to rework and modify the light and shadow so I had to leave it as it was. I did however add some light blue to the sky to add colour but I’m not sure it’s very convincing.