The next stop is Copyright Infringement

A few days ago for some unknown to me reason I decided I want to draw a bus stop. And so again I typed it into the search engine and found ... this ... Amazing as watermelon and strawberry bus stops are it wasn't what I had in mind so I continued to scroll down the picture lane (yeah even I find this a lame expression, oh well) and found a really cute drawing perfectly capturing the feeling I was looking for.

Link to the original artists devianart

This is by a deviantart artist called kskb. I liked the simplicity and the serene beauty of the painting so I decided to just, you know, copy it. 

Seeing as this is already a drawing this wasn't that difficult to try and replicate. Some of the details took a bit of trial and error. For example the sliding doors of the small store behind the bus stop are drawn as a double line where they meet in the middle - everywhere else is single. This isn't difficult to draw it's just two parallel lines more, but still I managed to mess it up. Fortunately I cought it early and it was an easy fix. A small tip for the doors - if you notice the lines don't align perfectly so I drew them one by one for every section instead of making one long line from beginning to end. 

However by far the most difficult part of this was the small street that disappears into the background. I used the one point perspective to draw it and had to change the placement of the point where all lines meet 3 times. For some reason the street somehow didn't align properly and came out too elongated or too squished. In the end using a few light lines to try out the different positions I managed to balance it. ( If you wanna know, the spot ended up being the place there the pole and the top of the bus stop sign meet.) 

The little corner at the end where the two streets meet is also tricky because there is no point of reference, meaning I didn't know how to align it properly. Again sketching out the fence first with some light lines helped me find the final placement and although not perfect, it's not bad either. I left the buildings behind the fence for last, because they were simple enough. 

What's left now is the shading and the texturing. Especially in a black and white pencil version having different textures helps the images pop out and not simply blend in a grey mess. I copied the line work in the original painting and then tried to vary the shading as best as possible. I found that using a softer pencil helps create deeper tones easier and that I should avoid it in the light areas. For the most part I used a 2B pencil but filled in the streets with 4B, then in the end I used my eraser to create the 2 white street markings in the front so they don't have a dark sharp outline. 

All in all I like how this ended up looking. It was good practice for the one point perspective, shading and texturing techniques. Even though it's light years away from the original a piece like this is a confidence booster. And believe me every art noob needs some of that.