APP Home (AOI): Further Experimentation - A New Perspective

Following the crit I had with my classmates and lecturers I have decided to try out a new perspective where the Big Ben would be at the bottom and the bus at the side, so I'm shifting everything once over (if that makes sense). 

The first thing I did then was open up my original painting file and then duplicate it, placing it under the name 'New Composition'. I then deleted all of the unnecessary layers and created two groups: one for the line art (which was done previously) and one for the colour. I made the background layer grey and hid all of the coloured layers. 

Using the lasso tool I went around each building and duplicated the selection onto a new layer, making sure that everything was separate so that it'll be easier for me to move, and then I moved and 'transformed' them so that they fit in their new space.

I duplicated the original line art layer again and erased all of the buildings on that layer so that I was left with just the road before erasing the edge of the road lines. At this point I realised that the edges had various widths so I changed it so that they were all the same.

I then used the Line tool to draw up new lines for the road edge. The change in width also affected the road lines and the distance between them and the new road edges I drew up, so I shifted them slightly so that they were all at an equal distance. I then rasterised the road edges layer.

Once the road is fully complete I can now focus on the buildings; working on one layer at a time I deleted whatever crossed over the edge onto the road, sometimes transforming or shifting the buildings so that they fitted on the page a bit more. 

I also deleted the areas where the London Eye is overlapping the bridge. 

Now it's time to move onto the colouring, so I hid my new line art layer so that I can concentrate on the colours. I duplicated the colour layer and hid the original, then erased the road because it's going to be slightly off as I drew a new road. 

I worked on the Big Ben first so when I finished erasing the road I used the lasso tool to select it, then duplicated it onto a new layer. I then rotated this and placed it inside the new lines (as I hid all of the other buildings and brought up the line art layer). I repeated the same process for all of the other buildings.

With those buildings done I can focus on the road, so on a new layer I filled in the road in a dark grey, and then started working on a gradient like I did before. Then I created a new layer and worked on the road lines.

After the road lines were done I worked on creating that blue tint on the buildings, so by creating a new layer and using a soft brush in blue I roughly covered the buildings. I used the Layer Style 'Soft Light' at 63%. Then I fixed all of the 'light' glows to go around the building by duplicating each section on a new layer, much like what I did for the colours. 

Time to focus on one of the main focal points of this piece: the silhouettes. I created a new group as I'm going to make some radical changes to the composition due to the arrangements made to the buildings, and it might mean that I'd have to create a new watercolour background depending on whether or not this experiment is successful.

Once this group was created, I worked on each individual character and played around with layout and how each one would interact. 

I got a bit stuck so I brought up all of the coloured layers including the watercolour background so that it'll be easier for me to figure out where to place each silhouette. This was where I noticed that the silhouettes are going to be a bit cramped and overlap with the 'smoke' section so I had to colour some of them blue in order to stand out. Looks like I might have to create a new watercolour layer...

Newer Version

Older Version

Conclusion:

Although I'm not very happy with this composition and it's relation to the silhouettes. As I have mentioned above, they look really cramped now as the silhouettes have to be transformed to fit so it doesn't look as if they 'belong'. Placing this new composition beside the old one, I much prefer the older version as it's more 'comfortable'. However this is mainly because I had planned each silhouette with the building so if I did this with my new composition then it would feel more 'right'.