403 Perspective from the Badstuegade street in Århus, Denmark done with ballpoint pen

I met with a good friend from architecture school yesterday. He’s been following my blog and it seems that he has notived that I do a lot of portraits and not a lot of architecture (or any kind of “spatial” drawing.) He obviously has a point. I just draw whatever I want to draw, and I actually believe that drawing portraits can help in the other diciplines (like say perspective) because it’s all a matter of seeing and noticing. The reason, however, that I have avoided perspectives for a long time is mostly due to it’s complexity. While it takes me an hour to finish a portrait to a degree I am more or less satisfied with, a perspective can take me 3-4hours and a headache, just trying o “calculate” where everything should be and so forth. It’s obviously not true, that perspectives should be more precise or “correct” than anything else, and I think that the loose and sketchy perspectives are the best of all. I’ve just had a hard time dealing with them.

So now I decided to try with my new remedy for overcomplication – the ballpoint pen. I can’t go erasing if something’s off, and if I go too slow, the line ends up stiff and lifeless. So this is a great tool for forcing yourself to go loose, and this resulted in me finishing an (albeit very sketchy) drawing in some 20 minutes. The best part is that the perspective isn’t totally off. As you might notice, it’s as if the viewer is looking down on the street, but I think it must be due to the streetview-car having it’s camera mounted on its roof. See the streetview version here
One thing that I keep returning to is this notion of “capturing the essential with little means”.. I’d like to be able to pull my little sketchbook out of my back pocket and sketch the essentials of wherever I am in 10 minutes withouth being too unhappy with the result. I think that maybe this is a step in that direction.