Temples of ancient gods, castles the day after a terrible battle, an old haunted house, so many places full of potential adventures. Yes, but now, you must first know how to draw these buildings in ruins!

 

I share with you my method which, although simple, is I find very satisfying.

 

We will proceed in stages:

 

• The sketch and the foundations;

• The anchoring and "destruction" of the building;

• Colorization, simple but effective.

I. The sketch: the foundations.

We'll start with a piece of Greek building, get some reference, inspiration (mine was on Pinterest) and let's get started.

 

 

Think with simple shapes but in volume, it's very important: cube, cylinder...

 

Don't do complex perspective (I didn't even use one), the interest here is to learn how to "destroy" a building. Draw your building without thinking about breaking it, but leave one or two elements on the ground or leaning: they will be remnants of what was broken (here it is an incomplete brick wall in the background).

Vary the size of the different volumes: for example on the columns, at the bottom and at the top, there are similar cylinders but of different sizes.

II. Inking and "destruction".

Now we go clean, for that you need a pen that suits you (for me it's the G pen), and activate the rule. Start by inking the vertical and horizontal lines, then turn off the ruler, and ink the other shapes.

 

💡 To decorate and make the structure rigid, make curved links in places: for example on the rectangular foundation, the two blocks are joined by a kind of "eyelash", the same for the cylinders of the bah and the top.

Finally comes the stage of DESTRUCTION!!!!

We start by adding texture, details: for example, the Greek columns are not smooth, they have sorts of edges that we just redraw with lines; they are also an interlocking of different cylinders and not a whole cylinder: we just delimit these cylinders by curves and come and "break" them a little on the edge.

 

💡 We must not forget that we work on volumes, so we must not just "delete" what we remove, but also trace the interior surface.

We continue to "break" our structure on both sides without forgetting that we are on volumes. We add "cracks" by making species of small veins, small branches.

 

Finally we rework the bricks by rounding them, breaking them, and cracking them.

 

💡 The stones of the time were cut by hand and are therefore not as regular as today, this also gives a less "false" result.

III. Colorization.

We start with fairly neutral colors (especially not saturated): here on cream. With the "paint bucket" set to "consult the other layers", we open another layer (below our inking) and color the structure of the foreground.

With a darker color, we color the bricks in the background and the darkest areas of the first: this will give depth to the drawing.

Finally, with a darker color, we color one or two bricks to vary a bit.

 

AND THERE YOU GO !!!

You now have all the keys to "destroy" your beautiful houses (in drawing recesses).

 

Practice as much as possible is the key!!!