I’ve never received so much email inquiries for an illustration that I’ve yet posted on my website! So I thought you might be interested to see the process work for The Highlands Illustration I did for 5280 Magazine’s May issue.

The Art Director wanted me to illustrate one of the oldest and now hippest neighborhoods in Denver- The Highlands. It would be an opening spread illustration of a place I’ve never been too and I had to somehow capture all the housing styles, buildings, famous shops, boutiques, tourist structures and ‘young hipster families’ in a single illustration with not much time before the deadline. I had no idea how I was going to pull it off but I knew this was going to be a BLAST!

CREATING THE HIGHLANDS ILLUSTRATION STEP BY STEP

Step 1: Intensive image research on all the notable places in Denver.
Step 2: Google map the locations and try to figure out where to place each building/structure in relevance to each other.
Step 3: When there isn’t much time, I quickly send off one sketch first and wait for immediate feedback before sending off another one. Here’s how the sketches evolved after communicating back and fourth with the art director:

Step 4: Quickly map out colours over the sketch, do the lineart and then colour, colour, COLOUR!

Step 5: Final illustration.

Hope you enjoyed this post.
Cheers,