London Sketchbook

One of the books I bought in Marlow last week was "London Sketchbook" which has paintings by Graham Byfield and text by Marcus Binney.

 I've previously bought the Venice Sketchbook in the same series. As well as being a nice book to look at, I also found it enormously helpful to locate different places worth drawing or painting when I visited Venice last year.

The "London Sketchbook" book also has great coverage of all manner of interesting places worth seeing - and sketching - in London. I was absolutely fascinated to find that I'd seen most of them at one time or another (maybe I've lived here too long?!) - but didn't know that the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth is housed in the former Bethlehem Mental Hospital or that Constable used to live in a house in Well Walk in Hampstead!

The 150 watercolour paintings and pencil drawings are accompanied by:

• a handwritten short commentary by Byfield on each individual painting
• an introduction to each chapter written by Binney which says something about the places, the architecture and the historical associations.
• a more technical gazetteer, again by Binney, which provides more detailed information about the age and background of each building.

A lot of Byfield's subjects are not ones you can either do quickly or do without some reasonable grasp of perspective and architectural drawing. But there were also vignettes of individual buildings which are within the grasp of a lot of sketchers.

His panoramic views of the City of London from the top of Greenwich Park were rather fine - but were obviously pre-Gherkin. I must have a go sometime........

I found I had already drawn some of the things in his book - and I'm not surprised his drawing of the interior of St Pauls has no colour as you are very limited as to what can be taken inside the cathedral to draw. And I'm wondering what size paper he used as that interior is a BIG CHALLENGE! Took me ages. You can see my various versions in the "Drawing the Bigger Inner Space" Gallery on my website.

Now it looks like we might be able to get a London Sketchcrawl off the ground in October (Big Draw month) so maybe this book could give us a few ideas of where to go........
Further details about this book are in the link to the book in the right hand column.

Technorati tags: art , drawing , London , pencil , plein air , sketching , sketchbook