The Initial Research

James Gulliver Hancock

The first artist I decided to look at in this project was James Gulliver Hancock. JGH has illustrated many building in New York city and so I thought I would be able to get more of an idea on American architecture as well as his techniques by looking at his work. He creates his colourful buildings by first drawing them by hand, adding in less accurate lines to show detail before applying his effective colour pallets digitally. In the same way I used his drawing style on other New York buildings then scanned them into Photoshop to edit. I did this for the Radio City Building and the Guggenheim Art Museum and was quite happy with the outcomes. 

Eric Rosner

I next studied another illustrator of architecture, Eric Rosner. Eric Rosner has a unique style as he draws buildings from the late 1800's of some American Cities. He uses ink marker to create stunning iconic structures, this process is then combined with digital enhancements. I tried to illustrate in Eric Rosner's style by using a range of methods. I first painted in water colours and then went over them in fine liner, I tried starting off with a fine liner drawing and then adding colour digitally and I also tried combining mono printing with the use of bright coloured inks. Out of all the methods I believed starting off with a drawing and adding colour on Photoshop was the most effective. I used this to illustrate the Metropolitan Museum of Art as it could serve as another building for the exhibition. 

Claire Rollet

Claire Rollet was another artist I researched in this project. I think her works are really effective down to the simple yet professional finish they have. She again starts off by drawing city architecture and then applying colour digitally. Her drawings are a lot more accurate than other artists I have looked at as she keeps them to a good scale. She is also selective about her colour choice, often only including two main primary colours and then using shades of grey on the rest of the illustration.

Julia Rothman

Julia Rothman has a similar style to Claire Rollet in the fact that she uses the same process and limited colours in her works. However, her building illustrations can be more like James Gulliver Hancock's because of the simplified features like doors and windows on them. Rothman also illustrates objects and then makes them into patterns. I combined some drawing of buildings and other New York related items (hot dog stalls, Converse shoes) I had done in her style into a pattern image. I did this by scanning in the hand drawings, adding colour on Photoshop and then placing them together as a new pattern. I looked at my design on a range of museum gift shop products then decided to put in on a phone case and package it. 

Brief

I was quite happy when I received the brief of East Coast Metropolis. I personally like and am interested by the culture over there and it seemed that I would be able to explore a range of it from architecture to the people. I had worked with buildings and people before and so I thought I could develop my skills further with this unit. As I do art, I was excited about promoting the exhibition. I first looked at a range of cities along each American coast. On the west, Los Angeles and San Francisco were recognisable where as New York and Miami stood out on the east. I decided to focus mostly on New York because of the ironic parts of the city, from yellow taxi cabs to landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. I also felt more knowledgeable on New York as I listen to music and have looked at artwork from there. My first idea was that I'd look at each part of the NYC's culture, i.e entertainment, architecture and produce graphical work for it. The outcomes would be either promotion for the exhibition or products to be sold at the gift shop such as mugs, clothes and stationary. After some research into New York museums, it seemed they were selling electronical items as well from headphones to phone & tablet cases and sleeves. A lot of these would require packaging in order to give them a professional finish. I thought about the ways in which I could promote the exhibition, I would need to create a logo, a name for the exhibition as well as styling it with a colour theme, I could work with current museum logos but personalize them with work I was doing.