Drawing Rome - My First Commission

Just before Christmas I finished my first commission under my Fine Art umbrella, as opposed to my illustration umbrella (www.howellillustration.co.uk) The commission was a gift from a brother to his sister, commemorating her trip through Italy. I do mainly wildlife art, because that's the thing I love the most, but I also love making maps, and as a result of that, buildings are one of the things I can draw. So, he found out her three favourite places she visited in Rome and voila:

Three miniature drawings of the Trevi Fountain, Vatican and Colosseum. Each of them were about as big as a fifty pence piece and each one took me 3 hours to draw. I love drawing miniature things, but tiny doesn't necessarily mean quicker. Sometimes it's harder because you have to work out exactly what details to fill in and which to leave out to avoid it becoming a muddy mess. You also need more contrast than there may be in the reference photos for the same purpose, and finally you need to be able to focus on tiny details for a long time to get it to look realistic - I sometimes have to use slightly magnified glasses to avoid headaches. As well as doing these little drawings, I also added an extra dimension by cutting them out and making them appear to 'hover' on the page. One of the things I also tried was turning this into a little map, but it ended up less fine art and more illustration - so a little more practice is needed before I go full fine art map - one idea for the future though?

As always, thanks for reading!

NHH