This is my latest watercolor painting of Venice it features the leaning tower of San Giorgio dei Greci which means “Saint George of the Greeks.” It is a Greek Orthodox Cathedral. I never get tired of painting scenes of Venice, the atmosphere, sense of history, and myriad of textures and earth colors, all say paint me! Watercolor is particularly suited to painting these atmospheric scenes.

The painting is based on a photo I took a few years ago while holidaying in Venice. You can see that it was taken on quite a bright day. For my painting I altered the sky to give the scene more mood. I also decided not to put in the blue striped poles on the bottom right had side as they were too prominent.

San Giorgio dei Greci watercolor painting

Leaning tower of San Giorgio dei Greci watercolor painting by Joe Cartwright

Reference photo for my painting

San Giorgio dei Greci and Venice Canal reference photo

How to draw this Venetian canal scene

Drawing a scene like this, where buildings are not parallel to one another as the canal varies in width can be a challenge. Also some of the buildings lean one way or the other. The trick is not to draw them with a single vanishing point but have the lines that converge on a vanishing region rather than a single point. You can see this in the image below. I have marked eye level as just above the bridge height. On a flat straight road with building fronts parallel to the roadway, all the lines moving away from the viewer such as window lines, would converge on a single point, know as the vanishing point, somewhere on eye level. However all such lines in this scene converge, not at a single point, but in a general region.

Drawing irregular Venice Canal vanishing points

As long as these key lines converge in the same general area the perspective in your drawing should look OK. Another way to look at this is that each building will generally have its own vanishing point, as in typical perspective scene, however the vanishing point will not necessarily be the same for all buildings an structures.