Observational drawring

I went on, in excitement, looking and taking pictures of skylines. Then I came across transmission lines which I found quite interesting as you would not normally see an electric conductor as an element of a skyline. My aim was to draw this picture in black and white charcoal in order to create the correct mood in the piece and experiment with different materials.

I started off using a pencil to draw the outline of the transmission line. After that, I added black charcoal on parts that looked dark according to the picture on it was drawn from. Of course the tone of the black charcoal colour was too dark so I added white charcoal which made the dark colour much smoother and have a softer tone. I had to be precise, so I looked at the picture carefully and continued to add white unto the black until the exact shade of the black was made. After this, I used a 2b pencil and softly drew the electric conductor diagonally; the lines were made to look parallel. I thought this was quite successful for me, as a starter, since I was more into drawing portraiture and not used to abstract yet. The reason this was successful was because I was able to create the exact sky that I saw in the picture. The sky is the main background of a skyline so consequently, if the sky is wrong, the whole piece tends to be wrong. Black charcoal was a great challenge because there was no other way to change the thickness of the charcoal than use white charcoal; this was a way of overcoming the challenge and erasing the thick blackness of the colour. The charcoal on the piece of paper then had a smooth texture which I thought made my experiment look like a realistic sky because it looked soft. I really liked the lines of the object, if I were to put more time into the drawing I would have made the lines a little straighter. To improve this I would try using a different medium such as watercolours for the sky and pencil for the objects therefore making a greater, more obvious contrast. The transmission line was a little too much, I think, since the whole transmission is made up of lines and not block which I think ruins the objective of a skyline. - This is because a skyline is defined by an outline of a building while in this image the outline was hard to tell as there are also gaps in the object creating lines and the object is not really a building. To improve this, I would focus on buildings for my next experiment.