Alex Pantela is an incredibly talented artist from Leeds who focuses on patience and attention to detail. Truly, his shop for artwork is even called The Store of Detailed Drawings. And that’s exactly what you’ll find there, immaculate handdrawings of Gothic, Renaissance and Victorian architecture that gets every detail right. That’s because Pantela is willing to take his time. Although his pieces are sketchbook sized, Pantela puts up to twenty hours into his drawings, making sure to catch every last inch of the architecture he’s recreating on paper.
Throughout Alex Pantela’s Instagram, you can see his work as it goes through stages of sketch and levels of detail until, in many cases, you get to see the finished product held up to the real thing and marvel at the uncanny resemblance shown to scale. Pantela’s black and white pieces are all finished in black ink and feature deft shading contrasted with the bold features of his subject. It’s amazing to see Pantela’s hand holding an exact miniature drawing of Westminster Abbey directly in front of the real Westminster Abbey as it pokes out over the sketchbook. Alex Pantela does this for many landmarks including Barcelona Cathedral, King’s College and Arco de Triunfo. He works in large, building scale as well as capturing the finer details of a building by focusing solely on a door handle or the ornamental iron work across a window. His ability to draw things as they are, strives towards the Platonic ideal of representation. Not only can I imagine having his skills, I can hardly imagine having his focus. It’s amazing, the kind of art that makes you look at the details of the world around you with fresh eyes.