Allerton Towers perspectives

Although I didn’t do much sketching when Matt posed at Allerton Towers the other week, I did spend much of the afternoon staring intently at the scene, usually over your various shoulders trying to see things from your viewpoints.

And I took photos of course. So back in the studio I did feel charged up to attempt a watercolour picture. And since we shared the experience of the session I thought it was worth recording my own process and posting it here.

In particular I want to emphasise that faced with a complex bit of building like this it was really worthwhile tackling perspective. The reference photo helped of course, in fact the lens had rather exaggerated the angles in a way that appealed to me.

But I still had to do the basic construction, which meant getting out a ruler or setsquare and drawing an eyeline, then locating vanishing points. Difficult in a plein air situation but easy at the drawing board, especially with a reference photo.

I decided the eyeline should run at Matt’s feet, and be not quite horizontal in the picture plane.

Unusually, this is a three-point perspective situation because we are looking up. You can see the left-hand vanishing point like a little nipple on the paper (bottom-left). But the vanishing points at the top and right would be some way off the paper, so I had to tape spare sheets of paper above and alongside.

Once that perspective work was done, it made the actual painting a much more decisive process.

My big decision was what to put in that blank area bottom-left. And since I had sketched both Matt’s poses the best thing seemed to be to add a second musician. This seemed to me to bring the situation alive.

When I posted it on Instagram, my brother (who is both artist and musician) said he could hear the picture. He doesn’t habitually compliment me, so I see it as evidence that an extra figure brings this sort of picture to life by creating a situation you can respond to.