Berlin Looking South - Pixels, Bit and MBs

Now that all the hand drawn work is done, completed and scanned the project is literally off the drawing board but far from over. I will start the digital phase now which can have its owns difficulties and challenges as everyone who works with heavy files will know all too well.

Luckily from now on I can save myself the work of scanning the drawing in lots of different A3 size steps and stitching them together at the end.

When the image you scan is already more than 2metres wide the digital file will inevitably have a substantial size even before having done any colouring work to it.

During the painting process it will grow massively last but not least because of the enormous amount of different layers which I use (every single colour and shade should have its own) and which will later facilitate the creation of different colouring styles.

I start with the easier decisions and drop the colours: grass and trees have shades of green and the water is blue (even though that’s probably not true for any river crossing a big city).

Streets and sidewalks will get the same colour everywhere. It always amazes me to see how much structure these initial additions give to the image. Immediately it looks kind of neater and not even that busy any more when you clearly recognise the street layout and the individual building blocks in between. Work feels much more manageable.