The last few months Mischief the product I work on at The Foundry has been running a monthly themed drawing challenge.
Unfortunately I’ve been too busy to knock up anything for them so far but this time I finally made an effort for the #DrawYourCity theme.
We’ve been putting out an ‘inspiration’ board for each theme and this time these images caught me:
I was born and raised in Central London and love living somewhere so charged and ever-changing. One of the best things about living here is being able to share the city with newcomers and show them your favourite sights.
My rough idea starting out was to draw hands offering up the city at night and to have the hands and city lights coming out of the dark. I started my piece by drawing the hands without thinking too much about what I wanted to put in or around them.
Once I was happy with the hands without really thinking about it too much I drew some of iconic buildings of London but also some of the ones that are less well known but I have a connection too, like the OXO tower that I associate with fire spinning on the full moon.
I drew the buildings in a matter of minutes intending them to be a rough outline that I would then draw over.
In the end I ended up liking the way it looked with the sketchy style buildings instead of rendering them in a similar style to the hands. The contrast between the styles and the loose lines give the city energy and life that I think would have been lost if I kept working on it too much more.
At David's prompting I added some colour to it and this is the final version of the piece I drew:
