This weekend I managed to visit Blenheim Palace again for an afternoon of sketching. With plenty of October sunshine and left pretty much alone this is a good place to sketch.

Firstly I set up to draw the lake and the view back to Woodstock. This is pretty much the view in the photograph below – except on this occasion I chose to fill two sheets to fit in this landscape view.

Here is a view of one of these sketches in-situ…

…and of a more complete drawing

In WordPress this comes out as a fairly small image but is actually composed from two adjoining sheets of A3 paper.

Moving on, I found a spot within the main Palace courtyard and set about drawing just one corner of the buildings here. As you can probably imagine- if you try the whole of the back of the palace then that can end up taking in a lot of detail – unless you have a way of simplifying things.

Here are a couple of views from the courtyard and my sketch in-situ..

One final image – a scan of this drawing.

And that was pretty much that. I am intending to do some more work on these drawing – particularly the landscape view of the lake. So I guess there is some re-drawing there, and maybe a watercolour?