Hi! I make this thread for everyone to share how we improved the drawings over time. I think it's a cool way to see some of the thechniques we acquired along with all the drawings that we have made. You can post here if you want to share your improvements.
I will start with a bit of me, you may not know me as illustrator because I only draw for Mexico (for the moment), mainly for my own city, which its diagram is almost entirely drawn by me.
I discovered this page some years ago when I was 13, in the year 2020. By that age I started to think more about my future and found that I like all the things related to architecture and engineering. I used to pay more attention to my surroundings in terms of buildings, I found that in my city were way more buildings than I thought. This because I live in a city (Veracruz) of about 540k inhabitants (city proper) and 890k (metro area), so in terms of Mexico this is not a large city, but neither a small, more like a medium to medium-large. That's why I wasn't expecting the number of highrises here, even with that, my city's metro area is the 6° with the most buildings over 100m in the country. This made me want to have something like a database to know and have the data of every building.
That's when this page came up. In the first time I saw that there were actually quite a good quantity of buldings of my city already added, but the bad part was that they were missing diagrams and some other buildings, along with mistaken heights/floors/status. After that, I discovered that everyone can request changes and additions for the database, so this, with the drawings, were the things that I liked the most.
With the fact that we were still during the pinnacle of the global pandemic, I decided to start to draw and add stuff here because I didn't have anything else to do but stay at home. When I began, the drawings that I was making were incredible for me, but now, I see they are obsolete and can do better. That's how this idea came up for me. Currently I'm still not an excellent illustrator, but I know that I have improved since my first drawing. I also expect your feedback if you can, I want to improve.
This is the tallest building of my city (it displays the "wrong" city because of what I posted in
this thread)
I was experimenting with a good curtain wall reflections and illumination with opaque glass.
This is the future tallest building in Mexico
I added more depth and shadows to the drawings. Also tried with simulating inside occupation with different lights/curtains in the inside. This is my personal favorite glass building I have drawn.
This is the evolution of both: My drawings quality and the building designs.
This shows how I learned shadows and all that stuff.
Here's how I improved the curves, from pixelated form to a smooth one.
Some of my first drawings
My latest drawings (well there are still more but they are awaiting approval)
You can see some differences between them, this because I'm still learning and testing different thechniques/methods. That's why some drawings look good and some other are better to keep them deleted
.
To finish, my goal now is to complete the entire Mexico database and do some other drawing and addition with the rest of Latin America. But I know this will be really difficult because only for Mex there are still 1566 buildings requiring a drawing, not counting the ones that are not added so it is way more than that and because I need to wait for an editor to add/edit one which I understand it because it also takes time to me to research. And the fact that right now there are only 2 active illustrators (not counting myself) that make drawings for the country (Martin H Unzon and Urbaner44). I will try my best to fill the database with draws and data.
Feel free to share your drawings and how you developed skills over time!
Linear Mode
