For my big group drawing I encountered a lot of problems. The first was trying to find a suitable picture of a group of people, most of whom are touching in some way. This was actually quite hard to get and most of the photos I had that fit my criteria were blurry. I went ahead with one of the blurry photos anyway because I've done drawings from photos like that before and confident I could make it work.

I did the piece on some strange textured, canvasy paper because it was the only kind of paper I could get at the time which was anywhere near the size I wanted and I wanted to start on it immediately. I realise now I should have done a few quick practice pieces on this paper that was new to me. I projected the picture of the figures up and traced them on with graphite. After I was finished I inked the figures with a brush and black ink. I found that this type of paper was actually really good for brush and ink work. The textured nature of the paper makes it good for holding ink and easily getting different tones. At the time I was actually worried that I'd worked into the figures too much.

I then projected a picture of the train station onto the figures and traced over the portion of the picture which overlapped the figures. I tried a few different photos at different sizes and chose which one fit best. I chose the photo below as I thought it filled each figure pleasantly and in a way that would capture your interest.

I had trouble when it came to penning the building. The fine liner type pens I usually use for this job didn't really work on the textured paper so I had to use a thicker bolder pen. I thought this still might work since I'd used this pen with inked figures earlier in the project. It came apparent though that the building was strongly overpowering the figures. This was particularly bad because the drawing of the building wasn't very good itself. I used a projector and ruler for this drawing to get the structure solid feel of the building but my inexperience of using both was showing.

On top of everything the pens were running out. I finished the main group of linked figures and decided to take a different approach for the two left. I didn't see the point in continuing a failing system. I switched to using sharpies (a different colour for each figure. This is something I had tried for a different piece but I thought would make this drawing too full on and the building too powerful. I also followed the penciled projection less strictly going back to more of a loose instinct type drawing but still with a ruler. I think this technique worked better but still the quality of the drawing itself isn't that great and doesn't work as well as some of my previous work.

I still have to add the bits of colour to the black and white figures. I don't know if it will work very well with them being so full and ill defined but I might as well try it as I've already messed them up and it might actually make the image better. Something I have to think about is do I add the supporting colour to the two figure who already have colour in them? I did to a previous piece I did with colour but that one was full of colour already. It did work really well and created a great visual impact though. I think I might. It would link the two to the other group more as well.