A couple of weeks ago I was in Oxford and decided to try drawing one of the city’s older hotels – The Randolph.

The Randolph has had something of a turbulent recent past. A few years ago it had a fire that spread from the kitchen and closed the hotel for many months. Since then it has changed hands a couple of times and I think is now owned by an American Company. It has also been refurbished several times over the past few years but hopefully it might settle down a bit now and regain its equilibrium.

Anyway it is a relatively old building with lots of architectural quirks – something that is quite daunting to draw but I had a go anyway.

Here’s a view of the hotel…

… and my sketch in progress.

Here is my initial drawing.

As you can imagine this took a while. With some of my larger and more complicated drawings I tend to break them up into sections. In this case I went back and drew some more – also adding a view of The Martyrs Monument and the front of the hotel (which faces the Ashmolean Museum). Here is that second drawing in-situ…

….And here is my finished drawing

Here’s a cropped view of some of that detail. At some stage I will add some watercolour – if I do I’ll keep you posted.