Rua António Granjo in a Picturesque Corner of Porto
2024-04-13
From Porto’s charming little streets, with their old houses and picturesque details. A few days back I went to a PoSK meetup on Rua António Granjo. Here in Porto, we’ve got a lot of streets like that, small and full of picturesque little houses, with their ornamented balconies and elaborate azulejos.
I always find myself charmed by that mix of styles and the abundance of color on the facades, in contrast with some pretty sober interiors. It’s almost like the street keeps all the celebration outside, and leaves the quiet for inside the house.
I like making drawings like this, more colorful, a bit different. This facade, for instance, had windows with really unusual cutouts, rounded ones, that when closed left room for this little balcony. I think it used to be full of flowers, decorating the whole thing.
The facades and azulejos of Rua António Granjo
What draws me in most on streets like this is exactly that visual play between the facade and its details. The azulejos, when they show up, almost never repeat the same pattern from one house to the next, and that turns the whole street into its own kind of mosaic.
Rounded balconies, like the one I drew, also tell a story from another era, when these architectural details got more care, almost like a signature from whoever lived there.
I made this drawing right there at the meetup, sitting somewhere I could catch the shape of the window and the curve of the balcony well. I used watercolor for the facade’s brighter colors, letting the fineliner lines hold onto the main details. This is the kind of record I love making at PoSK meetups, just some regular street, but full of stories to tell.