St Helens (the city, not the mountain) City Hall

The story behind this one is way back in the beginning we were working on line drawings for our sketches because the local art organization (not the Guild) was going to use our drawings as fundraisers on coloring postcards. We selected sites to go to each week. This day was perfect because they had roped off the street in preparation for Thirteen Nights on the River, a local to do every Thursday night throughout the summer so we had the entire parking lot in front of city hall all to ourselves. It was going to be a punishingly hot day so we set up in the shade of a giant oak across the parking lot. As is my practice I began drawing from the top down on the page. It was absolutely perfect right up to when a food truck pulled up in front of the building to set up for that night completely obscuring my view of the bottom floor... and I only had the top floor drawn. As luck would have it I had forgotten to take a reference picture before I started for "just in case" and just in case just happened. I ended up having to go back the following day to finish the drawing.

The original:

Long story short the coloring cards never materialized - well they did but someone had traced photos for them. (Yes you can tell.) When I found out our efforts were for naught I put my collection of drawings in my portfolio and that was that. Recently I was going back through them and thought I should "colorize" all of them. I must say I rather enjoyed this coming together.  You'll notice I added the buildings in the background so the scene was true to what it is.  Originally I left it out because the line drawing was more balanced that way and the point of the image was the city hall.  By adding the background it became a true urban sketch.  

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