I’m still doing the ink thing here, playing with the Winsor-Newtons that Mel got me for Christmas. This week I cheated a bit. What you see above is really a mixed-media piece. Using photos for reference that I took in Chicago last month, I came up with a drawing of one of the buildings you see while standing in the Loop, looking up and gawking.

However, after trying to use a brush with a ruler, sanity prevailed and I switched to a marker. I did try a bunch of stipling with the brush, but lost all that when I did an ink wash over the basic drawing. There’s also a little watercolor at play here, since I felt the brownstone building on the right side was too yellow and I haven’t mastered the art of mixing ink yet.

I was attempting to use some of the light and shadow techniques I learned imitating Hopper a year ago, but I don’t know how obvious they are in this piece because the composition is nothing like his. I think the end result is a weird mix of architectural drawing and hyper-realism.  The ink wash over stipling gave me an almost-photographic look, but my fingers were too shot to do the whole piece that way, so it sort of has one foot in each world.

To see it bigger try clicking HERE.

Check back in with PopCult later today because we’ll have a second post to tell you all about a milestone program this afternoon on The AIR.