View from Quarantine

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Back in March, as part of my art class, I had a project where I needed to draw on-site. The assignment instructions suggested going outside to somewhere nearby and spending about an hour sketching the scene. The sketch could then be finished later using a photograph taken of the scene.

Unfortunately, this project fell right during the week when several restrictions were being put into place due to Covid-19. We were only supposed to go outside for necessities, and I didn't think drawing would be considered essential. Thankfully my teacher was very understanding and flexible, and she allowed me and my classmates to draw a scene from a window, porch, or balcony. So, I drew this scene of the street from my balcony.

First I figured out how I was going to frame the drawing and which part of the view I would include. Once I figured this out, I knew which parts of the scene would be on the corners of the paper, which ones would be more towards the center, etc. Once I had the placement of the buildings, trees, cars, and other objects right, I started to add the details. For the buildings and trees in the background, I left them with simply the main shapes and forms. I added a little more detail to the building in the middle, but I left the window and balcony shapes pretty vague. Then for the buildings and trees in the foreground, I added the most detail. I suggested more of the leaves in the trees, and I included the laundry lines, window bars, signs, and air-conditioning units on the buildings.

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Three months later, so in the past couple weeks, I decided to develop the sketch into a more finished work of art using the photo I had taken of the scene in March. In order to save time, I used a light-box transfer method to redraw the sketch on another piece of paper in a cleaner way. With this cleaner sketch, I could begin painting on it without having to worry about stray pencil marks everywhere.

Using acrylic paints, I began with the sky, watering down the paint so it would be more transparent. I painted the buildings and trees in the background in the same way, not worrying about the details. I just focused on getting the general colors on the paper. For the trees up closer, I added a little more detail by suggesting the shadows as well.

After this, I added the color to the buildings in parts such as the balconies, railings, and edges. Then I painted the street using watered down paint, and made sure I included the wet spots and the newer, darker section of asphalt. I also added more shadows and highlights to the trees.

Next I darkened the buildings in the background and added a little bit of shadows to suggest their forms more. I loosely added in the windows of the orange building in the middle-ground, as well as some shadows and the sign of the store on the ground floor. Using watered-down paint, I created the shadows on the side of the blue and white building, as well as on the balconies. For the gray and white building on the right side, I painted in the details of the satellite dishes, the railings, the windows, and the sign.

Finally, I painted in the the windows, clothes, satellites, and air-conditioning units on the blue building, the parked cars, the dumpster, and the little bits of grass and bushes along the sidewalks. To finish, I added the shadows of the tree in the foreground, darkened the shadows on the trees, and added yellow-green highlights to the trees on the right side.

There's my view from quarantine!

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This style of painting was fairly new to me, but I really enjoyed it. I loved that it was a looser style--not perfectly straight lines, not crisp and clean edges everywhere, not all the details of the far buildings--and yet it's still realistic. It was a good way to capture how everything looked without trying to exactly copy a photo. I think this style works really well for buildings and other similar structures, since it can create that realistic and familiar look without making it look like an architectural design with perfectly straight lines and precisely measured angles. It allowed me to give the painting an artistic touch of my own.