A cedar doorway in Derb Jdid, drawn in the two hours it stays shaded
In Marrakech the working day for a drawing is not decided by how much time you have. It is decided by when the shadow leaves the wall you are drawing, and in Derb Jdid in late September that is about two hours long.
Place card — Derb Jdid, a cedar doorway off Rue Riad Zitoun
| Kind | Spot sketch |
|---|---|
| Coordinates | 31.6330, -7.9890 |
| Country | Morocco |
| Medium | Watercolour |
| minutes on site | 130 min |
| Tools in the bag | Escoda Prado No.4 · Isabey 6224 No.6 · 12-pan travel palette · Stillman & Birn Beta A5 · 300 ml water · cotton cloth |
| First published | 29 Sep 2026 |
Reading the shadow before unpacking
The alley runs roughly north-south, with four-to-six-storey walls on both sides, which means direct sun only reaches the lower two metres for a couple of hours a day and never at noon. In late September the doorway I wanted was in shade until about 10:15 and back in shade from roughly 12:20 — a working window of about two hours and five minutes.
| Time | What the light is doing | What to draw |
|---|---|---|
| 08:00–09:30 | Whole alley shaded, cool and flat | Not worth starting; no contrast at all |
| 09:30–10:15 | A band of sun on the opposite wall, doorway still shaded | Place the drawing, mix colours |
| 10:15–12:20 | Doorway lit by bounce only, deep shade at the top of the frame | The two hours that produce the page |
| 12:20 onward | Sun over the roof, wall flattens, heat haze | Stop; the drawing is a different drawing |
The 09:30–10:15 slot is not wasted. It is when the pencil goes down and the palette gets mixed, because once the window opens there is no time to be deciding what ochre the wall is.
The ochre wall, and why it is three colours not one
A pisé wall in Marrakech reads as a single colour and is not. In shade it is a cool reddish-grey, in bounce light it is warm and pale, and where it is stained by a century of hands and water it goes brown-violet.
| Area | Mixture | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Shaded wall | Yellow ochre 2, burnt sienna 1, ultramarine 1 | The ultramarine is what stops it going orange |
| Bounce-lit wall around the door | Yellow ochre 3, raw sienna 1 | Apply thinly; this is the lightest large shape |
| Stone threshold, worn | Raw sienna 2, burnt umber 1 | Dry-brush over the top for the wear |
| Stained base of the wall | The shaded mix plus alizarin | Only the bottom 40 cm |
The most common mistake with a wall like this is painting it as one flat ochre. A flat ochre wall in a shaded alley does two bad things at once: it looks like the sun is on it, and it kills the doorway, because the doorway's whole job is to be darker than the wall around it.
The doorway is the darkest thing, and it has to be painted first
Counter-intuitive but reliable: on a page like this, the doorway's interior is the darkest value and everything else is arranged around it. Paint it early, while the paper is dry and the wash can be controlled, because that dark shape establishes the scale of everything else.
The cedar door itself is drawn into that dark with a fine brush and slightly stronger mixture — the frame, the two panels, the iron studs — but the door is never lighter than the shadow it sits in. A door painted lighter than its own shadow is the single most common failure in doorway drawings, and it happens because the door is the interesting thing and the shadow is not.
What a doorway has that a street does not
A street view gives you depth and no intimacy. A doorway gives you the opposite: a single frame, one metre wide, in which everything is within arm's reach and the drawing lives entirely on texture. It is also, practically, the best subject in a medina, because it is small enough to finish in one sitting, it is socially acceptable to stand in front of it, and nobody minds a person drawing a door.
The one thing it needs is honesty about scale. A doorway drawing with no human element to compare against has to carry its own scale cues — the height of the threshold, the width of the door relative to the frame, the size of the iron studs. Getting those right is what makes the drawing read as a door rather than as a rectangle.
- Time: 130 minutes across two sessions, the second one after the sun had flattened everything and produced a worse drawing
- Water used: the full 300 ml
- One thing to bring next time: a second water container, because the cloth cannot clean a palette this many times
- Would a stool help: marginally. The alley is narrow enough that sitting blocks the passage, so this was drawn standing