Chapter 2 | CASTLES
I’m going to show you two real existing castles and for each of them a different way to draw them. The first is in Manzaranes el Real, in the middle of Spain. This castle from 1475 consists of two enormous floors with three mighty towers on top.
Exercise 1: build the Spanish castle following the next steps. Don’t draw the ground line too close to the bottom edge of your paper. Draw each step before moving on to the next step.
With the finish you show with fine lines that it is a building of stone.
The second castle is the Muiderslot (Amsterdam castle) in Muiden in North Holland, built around 1285. This castle is more complicated to draw because there are no clear building layers like in the Spanish castle. On the right is the entrance with a drawbridge over the moat. The windows are tiny and are in irregular places. Small windows (and very thick walls) kept the castle well insulated against cold or heat. Large windows would also be more vulnerable in a siege.
Exercise 2: Draw the Muiderslot following the next steps.
Step 1: Draw the middle tower in the middle of your paper. Make sure you leave enough room for the rest of the castle. The base line here is leafy. For the pointed roof, first draw a guideline from the center of the tower to the highest point. From the highest point you draw the lines to the tower. This way, a pointed roof will never be crooked!
Step 2-3-4: build the left and right sides of the castle against it, as if you were playing with wooden blocks: first the wide part of the wall on the left and the narrow part of the wall on the right (step 2), then the next towers and so on (steps 3 and 4). Check with guides whether you have the heights correct.
Step 5: draw the windows and other details.
Extra: maybe you like to look for other castles to draw or fantasize about your own castle, medieval, fairytale or futuristic. Just start somewhere with a tower, a staircase, a building layer or a piece of wall. Wherever you want you build something against or on top of it.
