Chicago Skyline Commission
I was approached by a client to paint their favorite way of the Chicago skyline. It’s what you see from one of the bridges in Grant Park, that go over the Metra tracks. It is also one of my favorite spots, but then there are many great locations to enjoy the skyline of this city.
The idea was for this to become a 16x20” digital painting. To work at that kind of size, the painting needs to have more detailing than my typical urban sketch.
For digital work, I often draw the lines first, and put them into a lower, translucent layer. Then I play with color schemes and brushing styles, to see which look best fits the painting. In this case, the client also specified that they wanted it to depict a sunny, summer day.
In the first run with colors, I tried to see how the colors stood next to one another. In some of my digital artwork, I try to mark shapes with color rather than border-lines. I wanted to see if it would work here. But that style wasn’t well suited to this scene. So I abandoned it early.
You can catch the full video of the drawing process in this video.
I use a lot of shortcuts when drawing windows and other architectural details. If the object is far away from me, I don’t spend too much time on it. This also helps to draw focus to what is important to my scene.
But I did make corrections for things like perspective and lighting even late into the drawing process. I realized I could not be careless with the perspective angles because the scene was so wide. For stylistic ink drawings, I take liberties with skewed perspectives, but it looks out of place in a piece that is not otherwise in the “spontaneous” style.
