Happy 2020 to everyone! Already well into January now. Hope to be pushing Building Block Studio over this coming year!
A new year’s postcard design I made for Eawase
Instagram Page
I’ve slowly been building tis side project now and been putting some old images into instagram to get it going. Have a small backlog of things to show the style of B.B.S
I did a while back a piece called “NYC Squares” - lots of scenes of NYC assembled together to show you a mood of the city. Squares which also one by one fit nicely into an instagram post. And a good excuse to show zooms of them each on their own.
Source: http://squarespace.com
How I work
The idea of Building Block Studio is to draw cities and buildings all by hand, with ink and paper, sometimes with watercolours. Hopefully keeping this ethos, I will be able to develop the style and concept and make it evolve steadily to… who knows!
Nowadays, with lots of the illustrations we see all made on the computer, I find we loose a lot of the craftsmanship process in an illustration as well as the looser and impromptu touch things by hand can have. An illustration of Building Block usually goes:
What are we drawing? Once we know this, I will research the cityscape and get photo references. With Google maps in 3D and Google street view I can usually get pretty precise references of a cityscape.
I will then gather all the imagery, maybe use some as base images and get a rough sketch by pencil done. Get the buildings in straight and get a nice balance of the general scenery.
Once all that is done, inking! I’ll again look at reference images. How many windows on the façade? The style of windows… and so on and steadily fill in the city. The pencil sketch will help me keep everything nicely balanced so that it doesn’t go too wonky. I love the imperfections you get with hand drawn lines but not too much!
Once the inking is done, either I will colour it by hand or it’ll go to the scanner. Then depending on the needs, retouching and some digital colouring and formatting.
I hope to make a better post in the future about my work process as the website beefs up a bit more.
Cheers!
Getting started
Hello! So the Building Block Studio website is up and running now! Welcome to the page and the blog. I will hopefully be posting (semi) regularly to show some work not on the actual website as well as keeping people in the loop on the things I will be doing through this studio name.
I decided to focus on my architecture and line illustration through this name rather than my artist name Hugo Yoshikawa to truly focus on my city based illustration without worrying about whether it really went hand in hand with my looser and paint based stuff. I hope to create a fun body of work through this name and push this 2D world to a different dimension than it previously was.