Blog written by: Fabian Musto | Written on: Tuesday 12th October 2021
Drawn from: Wednesday 22nd September to Thursday 7th October 2021
Artist: Fabian Musto | Inspiration: Impressionism and Pointillism | "Celebrating Hereford"
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On Wednesday 15th September, we were asked to create our take on a poster for "Celebrating Hereford: 1621-2021", a tribute made by the Black and White House Museum; the museum is housed in the Old House in High Town, built four hundred years ago in 1621. This project intrigued me to create a rough sketch poster, where I drew High Town in Hereford from memory! It took me four hours to draw and infill the buildings with my
Staedtler colouring pencils, and I was told to work on black paper; this gave a different look to my work, and the colouring pencils gave the appearance of soft pastels, which was my original idea to use as my main material for the finalised project. The picture to the right is the source I used for my rough sketch drawing, and this picture was taken in 1895 (the Old House was altered five years earlier).
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BASIS FOR "CELEBRATING HEREFORD: 1621-2021" PROJECT:
On Wednesday 22nd September, I decided to create a two page drawing for the project, based on my Grayson Perry-inspired tapestry of my custom settlement Marcleston. I chose not to use soft pastels for the project because I disliked my rendition of the Buttercross building on High Town, which used several soft pastels to infill the building. My result look amateurish, and I knew drawing buildings with soft pastels would take several weeks or months to finish. Interestingly, my drawing of the building resembles the Impressionist style, a common art movement of the late 19th century which was a definitive style of French artists like Claude Monet and Camille Passarro.
Picture (below): rough sketch (15.09.2021)
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PROGRESS OF DRAWING "CELEBRATING HEREFORD: 1621-2021":
22nd September: This was the day where I planned to work on the final piece of the project, and I decided to feature the Old House as the main subject for present, since the "Celebrating Hereford" project was an idea by the Black and White House Museum, housed in the Old House in High Town, Hereford. The Old House was built in a row of timber-framed buildings in the Stuart era in 1621, and they faced the town hall of 1599 in High Town.
I began to draw the Old House from top to bottom, and this began with me drawing the cut diamond shape at the top of the drawing. Drawing the diagonal lines with my ruler was a challenge, but I made little mistakes while inserting the vertical timber lines on the front face of the building. When the day ended, I completed the manhole, postbox, bicycle and miniature garden in the foreground.
23rd September: I began to infill the timbers with my brush fine liner from my toolbox, which took a few hours to complete. I inserted horizontal lines on the roofline after, and began to infill the postbox and bicycle with my colour markers. I attempted to do the same with the flowers in the garden, but I remembered an art movement from the 19th century that would be handy for this drawing.
The technique I used to infill the garden was pointillism, an art movement that features small distinct dots of colours in patterns to form an image. The movement was pioneered by the French artist Georges Seurat in the mid-late 1880s, and he prominently featured the movement in his artworks until he died in 1891 at the age of thirty-one years old. Infilling the plants in pointillism saved time for me, since I struggle colouring in flowers with detail. I used green, dark green, purple, magenta, red and brown colour markers to infill the garden, and this method took me an hour or less to complete!
27th September: I worked on completing the bottom-right section of the Old House, where I added the entrance door and more timbers and windows. I added the Lloyds Bank building of 1927 in the background, a neo-Classical building they provided for High Town; they also presented the Old House as the Black and White House Museum in 1929.
28th September: I added the premises of Coffee #1 next to Lloyds Bank, and like the adjoining building, I added detail on the building. The details are clear to see on the bank building, since I infilled the building with my Staedtler yellow colouring pencil; this is not the case for Coffee #1, where I infilled a mix of tangerine and dark pink colour markers on the building after I applied fine lines on the building; they can be seen faintly.
29th September: From 8:35am to 4:05pm, I worked on the Old Town Hall building, and I began from drawing the golden coloured cupola on top to the timber pillars at the bottom. Working at a perspective made this drawing challenging compared to the Old House, but I enjoyed infilling the several mullioned windows with my fine liners. The wall tablet in the top centre of the building records the year it was built, and I tried my best to write the inscription with my 0.05 m fine liner! The Old Town Hall was built in 1599, and was described by Nikolaus Pevsner as the "most fantastic black and white building imaginable, three-storeyed, with gables and the richest, most curious decoration". Its upper storey was removed and timbers plastered in 1782, which made it blend in with the Georgian brick buildings (most timber-framed buildings at this time were plastered or demolished, with the exception of the Old House and other timber-framed buildings on Butchers' Row). The Old Town Hall was demolished in 1862 when it caused congested traffic, and it is long forgotten now. I chose to include it in my final piece to inform visitors and locals about this extraordinary lost building, one of many buildings in Hereford that did not deserve to get demolished in the past 50-160 years.
30th September: I added a building to the left of the Town Hall, with a cobbled pavement adjacent. I also added the bell tower of All Saints church behind the timber-framed buildings, which predates them all by three centuries (built in the 13th century). I ended the day by infilling the road with my grey Staedtler colouring pencil, along with adding buildings in the background to the right.
I also accomplished adding texture to the cobbled pavement, where I drew several semi-circular shapes and vertical lines on the boundary.
6th October: I began to add shadows on the streets and buildings, as present on the picture to the right. I also began to infill the sky in the Impressionist style, where I apply my Staedtler colouring pencils (cyan), then rub out with my eraser horizontally to give the effect that clouds are in the sky. On this day, I began to finish infilling unfinished objects in my Old House drawing, e.g. umbrellas and chairs (on the site of the Old Town Hall, 1599-1862).
7th October: After applying another colour to the road in the foreground (orange, Staedtler colouring pencil), I realised that both my drawings for the project looked complete! The pictures seen below show details of both drawings (Old House and Old Town Hall).
1. detail of timbers on the Old Town Hall.
2. detail of diamond pattern shapes on windows, applied after infilling them with tangerine and dark blue colour markers (note: fine lines of diamond pattern shapes were applied before colour markers, they were re-applied after they disappeared beneath the addition of dark blue-tangerine colours).
3. All Saints church tower, several rounded and semi-circular shapes represent stones.
4. Impressionist style shown in sky (left: Old Town Hall, right: Old House). (note: this style has been used for my artworks beginning with my drawing of Borth seaside in my A5 sketchbook in 2019)
5. Pointillism in High Town, site of Old Town Hall. 6. Wall tablet on Old Town Hall, inscription reads: "This tablet commemorates the construct(ion) of the Market Hall in High Town, close to Butchers Row. Built MCMXXCLXVII (incorrect Roman numerals=1977, correct: MDXCIX=1599".
TRIVIA: The "Hereford Through Time" book by Derek Foxton, 2009, was used as my main reference for the Old House drawing (second picture seen at the bottom on page 46)
=A newly planted birch tree blocks the view now, but my drawing shows what the view would look like if it wasn't planted.
-The Old House drawing was based on a
posthumous painting of the building after its demolition in 1862 (timbers removed 1782).
CONCLUSION: This project brought a lot of enjoyment from me since the project was announced at Arts College on Wednesday 15th September, and I believe I was the only student in my class who knew the (entire) history of architecture of Hereford at that point. There are some mistakes in the window-frames, but other than that, the two drawings are favourites of mine this year!
My favourite drawing of the two is the Old Town Hall, since I executed the detail of the mullioned windows and timbers accurately. My initial and developing ideas and rough sketches led the final piece to a great start, and this marks the first time I have drawn Hereford since 7th January 2017.
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"Celebrating Hereford: 1621-2021" by Fabian Musto
Written on Tuesday 12th October 2021, 13:15 / 1:15pm - 16:50 / 4:50pm.
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