My project for course: Expressive Architectural Sketching with Colored Markers

For my Final Project I chose a photo which I took while on vacation in Mostar, Bosnia i Hercegovina; its a photo of a section of the old town that surrounds the Old Bridge (Stari Most), which is the center of attraction in Mostar. I used 8 buildings from this photo, just off the end of the bridge, and took some artistic liberty to isolate those 8 buildings from the bridge (using a citadel wall to surround the city).

As Mr. Kiefer requested, I created a back story for this image. The main theme of the image is a (magical) bakery called “One of a kind” housed in a oddly shaped, pinkish, building around the corner, at the end of the street; you can see it from here. They only make one pastry per day, just 1. It’s heavenly. Behind the counter was my mother, she was waving for me to come in. My mother lived in the US, and has never been to Moster, let alone Europe… while she was alive. A man sitting at a table outside the bakery kept telling me “Don’t do it”. I asked “Don’t do what?”. I looked again at my mom motioning me to come in, while holding up a one of a kind pastry…

I drew 3 thumbnail sketches of various buildings in the photo, and colored them, to find the best color scheme for this picture (they are included in this project). Then I made a photo copy of the final sketch and colored it (also included as material in this project). The 15 colors I settled on for the final project were the 15 lightest colors I could find. The full intensity colors, that I tried on the thumbnail drawings, were interesting but too overpowering; the color became the focus, not the buildings.

I applied these colors to the final project sketch from lightest to darkest; using the methods that the instructor had discussed in his demonstrations. All went well until I realized that the largest building was not living in the distant background. To try to make it recede, I used white highlighter ink and a blender pen to blur some of the details of the building, and give the illusion of a haze. I don’t believe I was too successful at this.

This was an interesting and satisfying project and class. I wanted to learn how to create images that were loose and interesting. I think I achieved that, but not as much as I had hoped for. I still paid too much attention to details, I will continue to developer my skills with markers and ink illustrations, but I still need to work on being looser and less detailed.