Berlin Looking South - Let's Scan

Now I need to go to the scanning service and then print the file as my under layer for the last phase of hand drawn work (yes, it’s not completely over yet!).

I want to fill the image with life!

Even though I had customers appreciating the completely empty, slightly surreal cityscape it is not very realistic and anyway I want to depict the very pace, dynamics, the hustle and the bustle of the metropolis. Berlin might be more laid back than London, Paris or New York but as every city it has street life with cars, buses, trains, boats and first of all people.

I start with the cars. Having drawn so many of them over the last few years to populate many city streets around the globe I still want to draw bespoke ones for every image as direction, angle and scale wouldn’t make it easy to just drag and drop them from one image to another. Finding matching angles would actually take more time than drawing from scratch and tailor them to a specific location in the picture.

At this scale I wouldn’t bother trying to draw specific makes, anyway cars seem to look more and more alike these days: stream lined. However, I could be tempted to add the odd Mercedes in Berlin, a 2CV in Paris, a Fiat 500 in Rome and of course the very iconic black cabs in London.

trains and boats

Keep the best for last: here come the people. When you depict people in bird’s eye view there is logically not so much space for individuality but still I take care to capture certain movements and postures. I always love it when you get a clear idea which way the person is going and weather he/she is rather energetic or contemplative. A few little lines can suggest a lot.

Since bicycles are a very popular and common means of transport in Berlin I also want to add cyclists to the image. Drawing bikes accurately is something very fiddly and can easily look wrong or clumsy so the challenge is now to find an abstract simplification!