Stylised town views

 As well as my visit to Coventry earlier this week, I’ve produced 3 variations on the same theme. I make no claim that it’s an original theme. Basically, you take a town, take its most iconic buildings and combine them together into stylised 2D front on street scenes. The first I did was this one of Port Talbot.

Producing a drawing like this is time consuming, but quite a rewarding process, especially if, like me, you like puzzles. Making a drawing like this is a bit of a puzzle in two ways. Firstly you’re using photographic references which are not, for the most part, from the angle you want. Or if they are, then the photo has the optical illusion of making them look like the buildings are slanting inwards and upwards – again, stop me if I’m getting too technical.Secondly, you have to try to work out how you want to make the buildings relate too each other – how you want to play with their relative sizes.

Well, in the space of a day and a half, this picture had become my best selling print on Etsy, so it wasn’t just me who liked it. Which encouraged me to make this next picture.

This is my other home town, Ealing – I should probably say my first home town. I was born in nearby Chiswick, and grew up in Hanwell in the London Borough of Ealing. I’d say that I  really started leaving home when I went to University, then I moved to Port Talbot in 1986.

This is Swansea. It’s my nearest city now, and I was intrigued to apply the same process that I applied to the first two pictures. Both of the first two have just over a dozen buildings each, while this one has a whopping 18.