As the title suggests – this isn’t the kind of stuff you usually see here. Well, you know, it’s still drawings, just not the kind I usually make, or even the kind I enjoy making.
I’ve been sketching from real life.
One thing that comes as a bonus for living out on the country is that the buses don’t go very often, and because I’m commuting in the weekends, there’s a lot of waiting time.
If I was a modern human, I would most likely be spending this time on my phone, but since I’m one of those stone age people who still uses a more cubic phone, I’m taking the opportunity to force myself into practicing the stuff I hate practicing. Drawing city-stuff.
I do enjoy depicting things from reality, sometimes. Like nature-stuff. But houses…. No.
There are many times when I see a lovely building and I decide that I really want to draw it, but when it comes to actually doing it, I always find it painfully boring.
But practice is practice, and even though I’d much rather be solving a crossword puzzle in this time, I know that this is going to be helpful for me in the future. Like eating healthy, or studying while it’s still free. I never did any of those things, but I learned from my mistakes.

These previous four sketches are things that I can see from the bus stop. I just wanted to get those over with quickly and didn’t focus too much.
The following two are from yesterday. I was going into town to do some food shopping and had two hours to waste while waiting for the next bus to take me home. So I went to two different spots where I’ve seen some nice architecture, that I always thought would be nice to get a drawing of, but never wanted to do it. Yesterday I had no choice.

The backside of the town’s hotel. I love scruffy ladders and stairways. Never knew how hard it would be to depict.
Those brick walls were from hell. I obviously didn’t care very much about how that looked, I just wanted to get it done. But apart from that, I’m pretty happy with this one.

The church. Or at least a part of it. I love how even the garden shed has fancy details on it.

So why is it so important to me to do something that I really don’t like doing, and don’t really have to? Well, because in a way, I kind of have to.
An illustrator (and especially a children’s book illustrator) should be able to draw pretty much everything, and especially architecture. No matter if your thing is spaceships and robots, forests and magical creatures or cuddly animals, you’re almost certain to bump into some form of architecture once in awhile. Just having a small sense of the structure of different kinds of buildings will surely be helpful sooner or later. Of course, there’s always the amazing internet full of references whenever it’s needed, but it’s not really the same thing. Just depicting a house from a picture is easy enough, but in understanding the forms, which is the important thing when creating something new, nothing beats live-drawing.

Especially the drawing of the roof on the hotel will come in handy for me. I’ve never even noticed that I have a problem with roofs, but this opened up my eyes for that.

I’m very happy that I put myself through this. It was dreadful, but extremely helpful.
I hope it wasn’t as boring for you as it was for me.

Em