Drawing Cities?

[Prometheus]

Hi, everyone! I have a quick question. So I’m in the process of doing concept art for my comic. One thing that's a BIG location in my comic is a specific city. It’s a completely fictional city, and I want it to have a unique, identifiable sky line. My first step is going to be studying overlooks of cities. Anyways, my initial question is: what’s a good way to get the structure of drawing a city down? How do you plan landmarks and make them consistent in city drawings? Probably a dumb question. (Plus, the rough draft I wrote up won’t go away on my phone, so I’m posting this topic to stop it from popping up, and to see what other artist’s opinions are. But mostly because it won’t leave me alone.)

[JRHoch]

Cities need to function. They have transportation networks and hubs, hospitals, business districts, parks, places to eat, art communities, etc. The have water towers, bridges. Think about how your city is used by the people.

[DualDragons]

I don't plan my cities at all .

But you could make a bird's eye view map of the city. This way you could point out certain city blocks, monuments and the infrastructure like @JRHoch mentioned.

When the bird's eye map is done, you could start planning the city out in 3D since you already did a 2D map on it.

Well that's my two cents anyway. But I hope it helps you! (I might want to start planning out my cities too)

[rajillustration]

Most identifiable landmarks have really unique and large sillhouettes, like the space needle, the eiffel tower, the Gherkin, the Pyramids. I would look to architecture or history and see if you can make a design that borrows from what other's have successfully done to create a really big building that is really easy to identify. It can also give you some lore and world building at the same time.

As for how to make them consistent, I think it helps to make a map. Not of the whole city, but at least the places where your characters hang out, so that way the landmarks are always in the right place.

[skicoak]

Our groups current story arc features a city that is a vital part of the story both in genre and tone.

So for these establishing shots, it's heavy into combining photo references with consistent featured small details like the wires and water towers. Then making sure it all meets a certain narrative tone.

As creators, some of us want to focus on the world building in ways that won't ever matter to the story significantly. I have to fight the desire to spend weeks making a 3-D map of a place in the name of "consistency" when what's more important is creating a consistent tonal atmosphere for the characters to interact with.

As a more practical answer to your question, You can use boxes and cans from you kitchen to set the general shapes of your key buildings to each other. Take a ton of photos from every perspective. Then you just have to add the facades and features to each building but you'll know how they relate to each other in real space.

[Prometheus]

@JRHoch @realdualdragons @rajillustration @skicoak

Those are all really good ideas! I REALLY like the idea about setting up cams to get perspective.

[fattackycats]

I suggest just opening up an actual map to a city and marking where all the major landmarks are to see how a city is structured, then go from there.

Also for good 3D reference I suggest video games! If you pick a game with a city (like for example Grand Theft Auto since it always has a city theme) you can just walk the character around a city and take screenshots of buildings.

Also google earth is good too, though the perspective is still a bit skewed even in the street-view mode.