Barcelona Sketchbook

This is the Front cover to my most recent sketchbook

So, Here is my most recent sketchook, this one stretches from about 2018 – late 2019. We went on holiday to Barcelona in February 2019. I thought I would share some of my drawings from this trip and some of my toughts about their creation.

Sagrada Familia

Our first stop on our trip was the Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudi’s magneficent cathedral, which is still under construction. I drew this sat down in the main hall of the church, I only managed to capture this detail from the top of the cathedral. I was going to carry on drawing on another piece of paper, but the security soon moved us along. That’s one of the frustrations of reportage drawing ; sometimes the security at these places can be a bit over -zealous, after a while you get good at avoiding them.

A quick warm-up sketch of the outside of the church! It is such a wild mixture of stlyes I could have spent a whole week drawing there – If our budget had alllowed it!

Gaudi Park

That same afternoon we went to the Gaudi Park. It was high up in the hill overlooking Barcelona and the virews were incredible. This drawing is of the strange houses that Gaudi built. They look like coral reefs. You can see where I had to tape another page into my sketchbook to carry on my drawing. I often find myself doing this – I’ll start a drawing off at one size, then realise I’ve run out of space.

Barcelona Zoo

Tapirs on the left, some kind of prairie dog on the right

Zoos are great places to practice drawing animals. You have to be quite patient, because often you’ll be halfway through drawing an animal then they’ll move, but if you wait long enough, they’ll often go back to the same pose / position. It can be fun to challenge yourself to vary the length of your drawings as you would with a life model and just think when” they move, they move and it’s time to move on”

Sometimes it can be fun to change media as you go. Here, I got in the quick outline with a purple marker, then went in with the pencil to add shading. I didn’t get very far, he probably moved.

I’m always amazed by just how massive Rhinos are in person! They have loas of wrinkles and folds of skin which are always fun to draw. I tried to capture the immense weight going through those hooves.

No matter where I stood, the Elephant always had his back to me! Sometimes you’ve just got to work with what you’ve got. It took along a brush pen that had a compartment in the handly for water, and a little set of watercolours. I used these to colour in my sketches as I went. It did mean having to wait for things to dry before turning the page, and bled through sometimes. But getting messy is part of the fun sometimes!

Picasso Museum

Here, I pared my materials back to just drawing with Biro. In the picasso museumI was recreating detials of Picasso’s paintings. It’s interesting drawing from other Artits work, you get a feel of how the composed things and its always intteresting converting things from one medium to another, these were boig abstract paintings and converting them to line-drawings gives them a more symbolic qquality, almost like a logo.