Traditional Drawing - Week 5 Year 2

 Week 5 - Urban Exploration - Lighting, Colour and Mood

References: 

Following on from last week's trip to the pumping museum, I was tasked with creating a final piece that replicates the atmosphere of Victorian artwork. I chose to use some photos I took of the beam engine room of the pump station, as I thought the richer tones would make for a interesting colour story. The shapes and detail of the various mechanical elements also would make for an interesting final image. I chose specifically this image as my reference:

Photograph by Me at The Pumping Museum, Leicester

I wanted to edit the image to add more intense shadows and to bring the saturation up so that it might be more interesting to paint. I took the reference into photoshop to produce this version:

Edited photograph taken by me

I believe I over corrected in colours here as the changes are very strong, however I think it helps convey the warm colour story more effectively than before. It also helped me choose areas of detail and darkness easier, as by darkening the shadows it helped to reduce detail that I could block out with paint.

My plan for the piece was to do it in Gouache paints with coloured pencil to add definition afterwards. The type of Gouache I have is a set of jelly gouache that is reactive after drying (so not acrylic gouache), so I should be able to add and blend layers to get the correct tones.

In Progress:

I taped myself a border on some mixed media paper, and began with a super simple sketch (That I don't have a picture for unfortunately) and some basic tones in colour groups/areas.

Painting in progress

I knew I was going to add a lot of detail and depth with pencil, so I focussed on adding larger shapes and forms as well as making sure that at least the hue of the object was correct.

Greyscale version of painting (edited)

I decided to view the piece in greyscale so I could gauge the contrast of the piece. I think the darkest areas still need to be darker, however just with paint I struggled to create tones that were darker without becoming incredibly desaturated.

Final Piece:

I found myself struggling to finish and refine this piece, partly because the paper I was using was very ridged in texture which assisted in keeping my gouache paints pigmented, but when it came to adding pencil on top it looked incredibly textured. I was running out of time to be able to get this piece and my other work done, so I decided to leave it at the standard below where I was especially happy with the central steam barrels colour and contrast. I think I captured a decent warm toned mood similar to the Victorian pieces we looked for guidance, but I could have added more detail and depth if I had more time. The gouache also had this lack of deep tones that I should have compensated for more with the pencils, but again this would have been a very time consuming process that I didn't account for.

Final Piece