BFU Dusk Cityscape
The bfu, the swiss agency for accident prevention wanted to raise awareness of the dangers of cycling in half light situations. The briefing was to draw a cityscape busy with bikes, cars and people. In an online competition, users would have to find three dangerous cycling situation in the picture. Apart from that, I was pretty much free to draw what I liked.
This project is a sequel to a similar drawing I had done for the same client a year earlier (see BFU Cycling Cityscape). So the slightly wonky but clean style was already set, I just had to adapt the color scheme into darker hues to create a "dusky" atmosphere. I usually work with a reduced color palette to get a consistent look. a couple of purples, dark greens, tans and yellows in this case.
The whole project was created in Illustrator. I started out with a scribble that defined the whole street layout, the viewing angle and the location of the 3 dangerous bike scenes i had to include. After that it was time to pick a place to start drawing. I first focused on evolving the scene around the station to get the light and the colors right. I covered everything else up so as not to get discouraged by the work ahead. That's psychology, man. Then I filled in the city street by street, put some buildings up, some cars and people on the roads and procrastinated a lot in between. The fun part was of course to add some sports & TV characters to the mix. We have ET, KITT, that Breaking Bad Winnebago and some bike racing related store names.
People genereally seem to like these busy pictures, so I got some nice feedback. It was the first time for me to actually draw a half light situation on a grand scale, so the whole color-finding process proved a bit of a challenge. Apart from that, did I learn something? Maybe I should have spent more time on drawing KITT. Looks more like a old Nissan Z to me.
Ever tried peanut butter and cucumbers? It's quite a revelation!
