mattjabbar:

“City in Paint” illustration series.

In many of my previous projects, I searched for pleasant, exciting, and nostalgic Japanese cityscape fragments. I then painted them as best as possible to make them look even more appealing. I tried to bend the reality I saw to do my artistic bidding, as is often done by animation background artists. Next, in the “Tokyo at Night” book, I explored and portrayed Tokyo’s night side, trying to uncover the truth about it. When painting those illustrations, I realized that I could make even quite desolate, grimy back streets seem appealing. This was a problem. Even though the final pictures looked “cool,” I wouldn’t say I like the original places, really, and would not want to live in a city like that at all.

So, together with Kana, we started thinking about how a more pleasant to live in city would look like. I tried to imagine everyday scenes from such a place without making them look too nostalgic and unobtainable. It’s not the “rose-colored” past or a world from an animated movie that will never come to be. I’m tried to paint a city that could exist in Japan even now.

I decided to paint digitally this time to convey more of the atmosphere of each place. I wanted to capture the temperature, the smell of the air, the play of the light, or the weather. For this, having the flexibility of digital tools helped a lot.

To fuel this creative attempt, I was using a lot of elements from the many reference photos I took in Japan during ten years of living here. Having a library like this allowed me to make the paintings more believable.

Technical details:

• Painting: Procreate, Art Studio Pro apps on 2020 iPad Pro 12.9 inch
• Editing: Photoshop
• Brushes: Download my Procreate 5x brushes beta on Patreon.