… and stop. Breathe, blink, and you’re back in the room.

I’ve missed a couple of posts as I’ve been really immersed in my latest project - which are works in progress at the moment - so only pencils today. It’s a series of stylised panoramic landscapes of various cities and districts for the card game Carbon City Zero (see previous posts), and it’s fascinating, energising, impenetrable and tortuous all at the same time [fig. 1-4].

The main challenge is working out the logic of the geography, and how I want to twist/cheat it to incorporate the multiplicity, culture and history of a place. The other challenge is simply the scale I’m working at - each one is about a third of a sheet of A4 - to try an ensure that when the images are reduced I haven’t overcrowded the image. I’m trying to get a sense of the layout of the place, but also the individuality of key buildings, quirks that can often be conveyed by just the right tweak of a line, the run of a bend, or the angle of the composition (and if I’m honest sometimes the luck of cramp at the right moment).

*fig 3: Manchester (pencil sketch) [this was the first image and the final versions are to be done with/without lettering, so for the rest I’ll do that on Photoshop]*

These are works in progress - they will be inked, and digitally coloured - and at each stage refined slightly. The joy of the pencil stage is the thinking through - almost the recreation of (in these cases) urban landscape: the choice of old verses new buildings, balancing housing, commercial and public buildings, and in the process finding the ways in which cities create links and delineation between specific areas and their spacial identities; and in doing so investigating the potential and challenges of these spaces.

I’m not done yet, and time calls. So I must re-submerge into the buildings, roads, rivers and alleys. I hope to come up for breathe soon.