Lesson 3

Lesson 3 was designed to make me thing about using relative scale as a visual device to help tell the story within an image.

I use exaggeration frequently as a device, and was careful to stay away from using scale as a tool for caricature.

I joined the Urban Sketchers London for a day on location by the River Thames in Twickenham, not far from where I live.

I split the day in two parts. The first spending quality time exploring the location to find an interesting point of view, and the second for design and developing a thumbnail into a more finished drawing.

I started by walking into York Gardens, and stumbled across the cast of Pride and Prejudice in full costume, doing a photoshoot in front of marble statues. It was a gift that I couldn’t pass by.

I explored different aspects of the same view building on learnings from the previous two lessons.

Fig 1 – Discovering an interesting point of view (2022)

After a couple of hours I stopped for lunch and developed the design further in a cafe. I thought the statues of the two horses and figures felt very grand and decided to exaggerate this by scaling them up in relation to the figures in the foreground.

Initial ideas didn’t work until I realised the design was too symmetrical. The final thumbnail, (on left hand side of the page), has the statues and figures offset, and this suddenly brought the picture to life.

Fig 2 – Designing with scale (2022)

I went back to the location to develop a more finished drawing using a combination of thumbnail design and observational reference.

Fig 3 – Thumbnail development (2022)

Reflection

Spending quality time on thumbnailing is key to get thoughtful considered design.

The scaling in the developed image is probably a bit too much, but it was a great experiment.

References

List of illustrations

Figure 1 – Hadfield, Hugh (2022) Discovering an interesting point of view [Fountain pen] In possession of: The author

Figure 2 – Hadfield, Hugh (2022) Designing with scale [Fountain pen] In possession of: The author

Figure 3 – Hadfield, Hugh (2022) Thumbnail development [Fountain pen] In possession of: The author