For this exercise I decided to use the temple next to my school, that my school gets its name from ‘Wat Makut’, Wat meaning temple. Temple’ grounds usually contain several buildings including monks quarters…dorms or whatever you would like to call them, the cremation furnace, schools for teaching student monks and a host of other buildings. After a walk around the temple I decided to draw what I think is a school room as it had a blackboard outside.
The best thing about Thai buildings is that they are mostly right angles and so it’s quite easy to get the angles and perspective correct when drawing however the downfall is that Thai temples are really quite technical structures and there was a lot more right angles than I was hoping for.
I started out by drawing the roof and the windows and although I knew this was supposed to be an exercise using only line it did help to block in the windows and doors with solid shapes especially on the irregular shaped roof I also drew the wall at the side in the same way buy blocking in the square shapes in the wall and then erasing the solid shapes and going over the outlines again with just line.
Although the drawing may look like I have used a ruler it was done completely freehand and it was by no means easy erasing and correcting every line in the drawing at least three times, and now and again erasing large sections of the drawing to start again. Getting things ‘just right’ seems to be my biggest weakness, it would have been a lot easier to do a tonal drawing of the building and I’m looking forward to doing so at some stage.
I marked on the drawing where I think the eye level is but I was sat on a chair outside the main temple building to draw it and I couldn’t really walk over and maintain the same level to check if I was correct. I thought I would have been able to do this at home but unfortunately the drawing fit too well on the paper and I couldn’t even check the vanishing points properly as the rings holding the paper wouldn’t let the ruler sit flat in order to draw the lines through to the other sheet of paper.
However from continuing the lines to where I think the eye level is it seems that the front of the building maybe slightly out which I can live with as I think I did quite well on this exercise. The drawing too me nearly three hours over two days and although the temperature here in Bangkok had dropped considerably over the last week the sun was still scorching hot.
My Drawing Course 