How to Capture a City's Personality
Architect and artist Carlos Stanga teaches how to find the soul of a city for your illustrations
Architectural illustration can provide a unique connection to urban space. It's a way to capture a moment or a building in time and to express creatively how a place makes you feel.
Artist and architect Carlo Stanga (@carlo_stanga) has done precisely that with the streets of Milan, London, or New York, to name a few, and has some tips you can follow to capture the soul of cityscapes in your illustrations.
Choosing the city
It may seem obvious, but choosing a city is the first step of this process, and it can be a more involved decision than initially anticipated.
Sure, you can always choose your hometown or the city you currently live in. That will give you a unique perspective because it is a place you know well. You've breathed its air, understand its culture, and already have an idea of its essence.
But another way of going about it is to choose a city you love or fantasize about. A city that is inspiring to you, even if it only exists in your imagination. You can ponder how a new building will fit in a space or visualize how a city will look in the future or how it looked in the past.
