Looking Up (and Down) in Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building

[Stephanie Bower, Seattle, in Sydney] I do like a good sketching challenge! A rainy Sunday morning, this was sketched while eating breakfast in the Queen Victoria Building in central Sydney and painted later that morning in the same spot. I liked the linework quite a bit, as I do love capturing complicated perspective views, so I kept the color to a minimum. I also like to keep all the construction lines in the sketch, as they reveal the process.

This is sketched with a mechanical pencil on an 8″ x 16″ Fluid watercolor pad. Colors are simple: French Ultramarine, Burnt Sienna, a bit of Permanent Alizarin Crimson, all Winsor & Newton paints.

At 10 am, a hefty group of sketchers from the workshop plus many from Sydney Urban Sketchers tucked into a corner on an upper floor to watch me overwork a sketch!  I used this location to talk about how I start sketches with simple shapes, making sure I face forward for a one point perspective. Then I painted, but I should have stopped about 15 minutes earlier-Yikes! Oh well, I think most teachers confess that we do our worst work in demos in front of other people, wouldn’t you know.  At least I do like the arches on the left…