The Shard

It feels as if the big year end winddown has started.  This will be my final painting of the year but probably not my final post.  It’s based on a photo that a guy called Chris Bristow put up on Facebook of a view of the Shard from his train window.  I was drawn to the photo by all the similar looking acute angles on view.  In my version I’ve applied some artistic license by using a protractor and making as many of those angles as possible thirty degree angles.  This does mean that the Shard is looking fatter than it is in real life but I’m fine with that.

I used charcoal today, almost all of it the chunky Derwent charcoal blocks rather than the pencils.  I just became comfortable at some point that the chunkies were able to give me as much fine detail as I needed, which was very little.  Down the right of the page I think that must be the darkest black I’ve achieved so far.  This was done using Kate Boucher‘s “shoe polish technique” with a chamois.  And you can probably tell that I used paper masks to get all those straight edges with the charcoal colours.  I was planning on using paper masks to help me erase out some lights in the building for windows but the marks I made with the white charcoal looked good enough to me.  I also varied from the photo in two more paces, making the platform more blurry and adding a cloud across the building.

I’m happy with how this one turned out.  The thirty degree angles definitely tease the eye but it’s the moodiness of this one that gets me.  It’s perfect for the slow Christmas wind down.  It feels cold outside the train and I can feel myself wanting to get home in the warm.  There are people on the platform but they’re all blurry, as befits their status as less important than just getting home.

This one is up for sale.