Good morning, now please direct your attention to a few fantastic illustrators making visual sense out of densely packed metropoli.

Drawing – by hand – is enjoying more prominence as a technique recently. The hand-rendered imagery of Hugh Ferriss and circa-1980s Daniel Libeskind seem to have renewed graphic relevance today, perhaps because of the ubiquity of the glossy digital rendering. And as a visual culture, we seem to favor the axonometric - from Atelier Bow Wow to Sim City, 3D is it for expressing information visually.

We have our theories about the dominance of the axon: maybe our visual consciousness is evolving, or maybe it’s that the level of discourse is complicated enough that it requires three dimensions. Or maybe it’s just a way for designers to overcomplicated simple ideas!

For sure, though, the complexity of the city necessitates a three dimensional (or at least very detailed) view. Click through for some cityscapes that have crossed our paths recently, plus news of a recent gallery opening by an emerging artist.

• Up-and-coming illustrator Chris Dent is doing work that uses the city as a visual language through which to express ideas – from Obama’s portrait to a map of the Lower East Side. A new show of his work opened last night at gallery7 in London, and Dent will be live-drawing the New York skyline there for the next few days.
• The destruction of Neo-Tokyo: Sci-Fi fans will scoff at our amateurism, but we’ve discovered the following frames from Katsuhiro Otomo’s classic manga masterpiece Akira that would put most architectural draftsmen to shame. Anyone needing visual inspiration will want to take a look at the images below.
• Stephen Wiltshire is an artist in the UK who has the remarkable ability to draw incredibly detailed urban scenes from memory. We’re not talking about “the Empire State Building,” we’re talking about “a 30′ long panorama of Tokyo.” Wiltshire was diagnosed with Autism at a young age, and has since been heralded as a visual genius. Check out his full Tokyo canvas here, which was drawn after a 10-minute helicopter ride over the city.

Chris Dent drawing on the gallery7 wall Tuesday night, for the opening of his NY in Print exhibit.

Chris Dent, images from portfolio, (c) Chris Dent.

Mr X and Chris Dent Tattoo Collaborations, (c) Chris Dent.

Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira, image courtesy of Sci-Fi-O-Rama.

Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira, image courtesy of Sci-Fi-O-Rama.

Stephen Wiltshire working, image via.

BONUS: A architecturally-damning graphic from a Japanese artist recently featured in VICE.

Anything we’re missing?

by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan

posted in General

tagged 3D, Art, axonometric, chris dent, cities, drawing, illustration

more articles by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan