Sketching a Tudor Revival House in Gillingham Park with One 4B Pencil

Today I’m at Gillingham Park with the Rochester and West Kent Art Society.

It was nice to see some of the members again. I hadn’t seen many of them for a while. Since we had the baby, I haven’t managed to join many of the recent events.

It felt good to be sketching again after a long break. Sometimes just having a reason to get out is enough, especially when it means a walk in the green.

Finding a subject in overcast light

After meeting some of the group, I set off around the park. I just wanted to see what I could find.

I’m biased towards architecture, period buildings and ruins. To find one of those subjects in a park or against a lush background is even better.

Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t helping. It was cloudy, and this dull light flattened everything. I wasn’t getting the strong, contrasting lines of shadow that can make a drawing interesting.

Sometimes you have to introduce that contrast into the composition yourself, just to give it some depth.

I walked around the park, but nothing stood out. It’s a park. It looked like it was going to be a tree day.

I love drawing trees, so why not? But even with trees, it takes time to find one with some character—something striking—and then find an angle that makes it into an interesting composition.

Trees are challenging in any light. They require more attention. They also require you to slow down, which isn’t a bad thing.

Discovering the Tudor Revival house

I was walking towards the far end of the park, more or less resigned to sketching trees, when I came across this beautiful house.

I was told it was a gatekeeper’s house. When I looked it up, I found it described as Tudor Revival architecture. It was easily the most interesting thing I had seen all day.

Trees could wait. I decided to draw the house instead, even though I didn’t have much time left.

Now I had something that looked interesting, but I didn’t want to draw it from the front. A straight front view would be boring and not particularly memorable.

I wanted an angle with strong perspective and an interesting composition, much like I explained in my post about finding the right perspective while sketching in Greenwich.

I went left. I went right. I couldn’t walk all the way around the building because it sits at the end of the park.

Eventually, I found an interesting angle from the building’s right side. It captured the Tudor roof and its strong angles in deep perspective, with the tall trees of Gillingham Park behind it and shrubs and foliage in the foreground.

I thought this was beautiful. It would make a great composition, so this is where I set up.

One 4B pencil and no plan

Then came the unfortunate part.

After not going out sketching for so long, I had spent all morning preparing my bag with all my materials: brushes, watercolour paints and ink.

I opened the bag and realised I had left the materials behind.

It was frustrating, but I was already there. I was about to ask another member of the Rochester and West Kent Art Society if I could borrow something when I found a single 4B pencil tucked away in the bag.

I don’t know how it ended up there. It was the only pencil in the whole bag.

So I thought, why not?

This was a nice challenge. I should be able to sketch the house with one 4B pencil.

I was committed now. Let’s see how it goes.

Testing the composition first

Within the first ten minutes, I could already see how the drawing might develop.

I began by capturing the composition in very rough lines: the dominant perspective, the large shapes and the relationship between the building, trees and foreground.

Sometimes a composition looks interesting when you see it with your own eyes, but once you put it on paper, it doesn’t work at all.

That is why it is worth testing it first. I make a quick initial sketch of the dominant lines, perspective and major shapes before committing to the full drawing.

In this case, it still looked interesting on paper, so I continued.

This was about twenty minutes in. I also stopped to take a few photographs and videos for the blog and the group.

Borrowing from Theodore Kautzky

By the half-hour mark, I was becoming more comfortable with the limitation of the 4B pencil.

I started borrowing some techniques from Theodore Kautzky, one of the masters of pencil drawing. I have written before about his approach in five pencil drawing tips and techniques from Theodore Kautzky.

Being restricted to one soft pencil made me think more carefully about the marks, tones and broad shapes rather than reaching for another material.

After about an hour, the location drawing was almost finished.

Adding the final mid-tones

When I got home, I had access to the rest of my materials. I used a Kuretake Japanese watercolour brush to add a few more mid-tones, then sprayed the drawing with graphite fixative.

Those final mid-tones helped bring back some of the depth that was missing in the flat, cloudy light.

Sometimes the challenge is simply to observe what is there and see what you can make of it. I had expected a day of drawing trees, but instead I found this house—and one forgotten 4B pencil turned it into a different sort of sketching day.

This is the final version. Let me know if you like it.