A how-to on drawing a futuristic cityscape.

Mood Page

ALWAYS have reference material. It is so important to inspire yourself with multiple ideas.

Find pictures of buildings you want to include, perspectives you want to try, signs you may want to include, shapes you want to attempt to draw,

Perspective

After deciding on your images, decide from what VIEWPOINT you want the viewer to have.

Do they view the city from above? Below? Are they looking at the buildings from the front of them? From the side?

Use Clip Studios rulers to create the vanishing points to draw from - this helps place your buildings correctly and creates a 3D environment within your picture.

The Rough Sketch

Place your buildings throughout your plane.

Remember: The further back the buildings get, the smaller they are.

 

Personally, I draw all the grid lines on all my buildings as a way to map my windows at a later stage.

The Final Sketch

Lower the opacity of the sketch layer and start drawing the buildings in various shapes and refer to your mood page.

 

I imagine future cities to have mostly odd shapes rather than the usual large rectangle, but for the sake of simplicity I stuck to a combination of both.

Colouring

A general rule I follow when putting in my base colours is the further away a building is, the lighter it becomes. This adds more depth to the drawing on top of the line art.

I create a palette of neon colours to use, and using my mood page with references to interesting shaped signs and words, I created my own neon signs throughout my city.

When I think futuristic, I think CyberPunk/Read Player One environments where everything glows.

 

Once you have drawn neon lines everywhere and anywhere possible, colour in where you want your windows to be. I colour them in a light grey that I will detail later on. I also black some out (you will see next) to imitate that some buildings can be seen as hotels/houses.

Now that we have added our base colours, we can start to decide where our light source is coming from.

 

I darkened my base colours and decided my light source would come from the left side of my drawing. I put the basic shadows on my buildings that we can build on later if needed.

 

For shading, I use different texture brushes to add texture to my buildings. I add both a shadow and a highlight.

How to Glow

Now we need to make our signs glow - but how?

 

1: Create the image of your signs. Try keep them all on a single layer.

 

2: Select the layer of your neon signs, create a new layer on top of it and fill the selection with white. Deselect.

 

3: Go back to the layer with all your signs and add a Gaussian blur to it. Play around with how high you want your values to be.

 

4: Duplicate this layer you have now blurred until your neon colours stick out and you are happy with it.

 

So, make everything GLOW:

Remember: now that you have made the neon signs glow, they give off their own light. We must now add this light as well to our buildings and have them reflect off reflective surfaces (If you have any) such as metal poles, windows that have been blacked out, as well as buildings surfaces in close contact with the lights.

Now that majority of our city is complete, we can add the odd ends that we haven't yet:

The windows: the windows with light in them are coloured with red, orange and blue and then covered in creamy/white colour in the center. This gives them that late night ambiance of a full window with reflections of the inside light.

The blacked out windows reflect the neon lights found throughout the city.

 

Lights: Random spotlights are places throughout the city - I chose white and red lights, but you can do any colour.

 

The sky: I personally didn't want a dark sky, as I did plan on it being a part of my light source. So I created a moon and filled my sky with purples and blues, and a few twinkling stars.

I also blur my buildings more towards the back. By blurring them the viewer is more intrigued by the foreground and is pulled there.

And with all that - your drawing is done!