With some of my biro drawings, I wanted to go further in my expression of forms. I tried various things and eventually came up with a means of adding an ‘exaggerated aerial perspective’ to the biro drawings, using high quality watercolour pencils.

Exaggerated Aerial Perspective

I thought that I could improve on my expression of the three-dimensionality of the things I was trying to express, by using some colour to give an indication of how close or how distant various surfaces were. The scheme I developed, and found most effective over many drawings, involved ‘colouring’ a surface based on its distance to me, using oranges and yellows to indicate close surfaces, and blues to indicate distant surfaces. That is, the closer a surface was, the more orange it was coloured. The more distant a surface was, the bluer it was coloured. This basic scheme was an ‘exaggerated aerial perspective’.

I have seen some ‘aerial perspective’ colouring used in some artwork by other people, but not seen any use of my ‘exaggerated aerial perspective’ scheme. ‘Aerial perspective’ refers to surfaces being coloured a little more blue as they get further from our view point, because there will be more air between the viewer and the surface.

I also wanted to try to express the space and air around the forms using pale blues to surround appropriate sections of the forms.

This whole approach, of using an exaggerated aerial perspective along with pale blues around appropriate sections of the forms in my drawings, required working with very subtle changes of colour, that had to relate to all of the other colour used in the images.

Eventually, I found it useful to produce larger images using pastels on coloured-ground papers. The overall impact of these larger images using fine conté or charcoal contour lines over pastels was much stronger than my biro drawings. However, they also required a lot more time to produce (in fact, some required an enormous amount of time to produce).

21 cm (w) x 29.5 cm (h), black biro and watercolour pencils on acid-free cartridge paper.
Date produced: 12th September 2002

Drawn on-site, near home. Here, I wanted to draw the twisting, meandering, tubular forms within this Weeping Myrtle trunk (growing by the side of the road within suburbia). The movements of form within the trunk’s forms are very expressive of being part of an old watercourse.

The colour work, done using high quality watercolour pencils, was added to reinforce the expression of forms and the expression of space around the forms. Surfaces that are close to me have been coloured to be more orange. Pale blues have been applied to indicate the air that sits behind forms.