An A1 pencil panoramic drawing from a picture taken on the Sydney Tower. This drawing took around a month working close to 6 hours a day, done primarily with a pacer and tonal pencil. The main goal with this drawing was to create a very busy urban scene that is full of life. In order to achieve this I added details to every part of the drawing, for example, people can be seen around the Opera House and trains and cars can be seen crossing the harbor bridge. Adding these small details gives the drawing a sense of motion and increased level of realism.
This was done after returning from a month and a half trip to Australia. I had two photos from either Melbourne and Sydney that I wanted to draw, I ended up choosing Sydney as that is where I spent the majority of my time and holds much more personal value. This was my first large scale panorama and the main problem I faced was endurance. Having taken over a month, working about 6 hours day, endurance was an issue I had to overcome. All in all, I am very pleased with the result and is one of my favorite artworks.
Fine-liner Panorama of East London:
This was created as a final response to my portfolio. It was intended to be an incredibly ambitious end to my project. At first, I struggled to find an adequate location. Some of the original locations included Midtown NYC, Downtown Toronto and motorways, several areas in London and areas in Mexico City. I spent several hours looking at my photos taken across these locations, looking for locations that showed contrasts of Urban Poverty and Luxury developments. I also wanted a very dense, panoramic scene that would be replicable without being inconceivable. Finding a balance between optimism and realism was a struggle when selecting an image.
In the end, I ended up selecting east London as the focus of my drawing. I did not have any large scale artwork of my home city and as such wanted to create something that holds personal value, dedicated to my home city as well as something that shows the different landscapes and characteristics that can be seen across the city. This is shown in the photo I have taken as you can see aged infrastructure and relative poverty merged with new developments in Stratford and Canary Wharf.
Artists like Stephen Wiltshire and Julia Schmitt were both large influences in making this final response. Stephen Wiltshire links to this as he inspired me to create a large panorama with ultra detail. Julia.C.Schmitt inspired me to create a very detailed and realistic fine-liner drawing. I wanted to replicate her attention to detail and create my own monochromatic depiction of London, as she does with Melbourne. Drawing upon these 2 styles, I wanted to create a work that captures the ambition and scale of a Stephen Wiltshire drawing whilst still keeping the quality and detail of Julia’s art. Overall, I feel I achieved this well but let the quality drop on buildings that would not be seem.
I developed on the previous panorama by using fine-liners instead of pencils as it allows me to achieve far higher levels of detail and giving the drawing a more realistic feel. By using the same techniques as my fine-liner drawings, I can create a panorama that has the look and feel of London, Capturing small details such as vehicles, graffiti, roof pipes and worn textures, I can create a piece of artwork that feels not only more accurate to the real world counterpart but also allows me to give the drawing a sense of life and movement.
All in All, I am pleased with the outcome, the drawing meets my intention of creating an accurate, realistic and detailed panorama of London. By using techniques such as cross-hatching, line marking and low ink pens, I could meet my intentions. If I were to re-do this Panorama I would have improved on it by working on a slightly smaller scale as this drawing was very time consuming and required a lot of dedication to pull through.