Today I played with a style of drawing I’ve only ever done on paper. I draw cities of blocks, circuits, and components that I mirror and build intuitively. Each shape becomes 4 shapes; each line becomes 8, the shapes reflecting to build complex and interesting “buildings”. I built two cities today: a simple one to test the process, and a complex one once I knew it would work.

On a four hour flight, I listened to Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology and drew and colored layer by layer until I was happy with the form. The first drawing took only minutes. The second took well over an hour. I really love the complex city I drew, and I see myself doing more of these in the future.

The trick to these drawings are the specific Procreate brushes I used: Technical Pen for the outlines and Syrup for the fills. The outlines have very little variation to the line thicknesses which is important. And the fills are solid colors, which Syrup allows me to do quite well. I’m slowly relearning how to draw my random doodles digitally so that I can skip my paper sketchbook when I feel like jumping into the digital world directly.