Minneapolis Buildings

One of my recent endeavors has involved doing superhero drawings for FallCon coming up here in a couple weeks. One of them involves Batman and Catwoman in Gotham City, and so skyscrapers and buildings play a prominent role. However, my initial drawings were unsatisfying, the buildings seem bland, unappealing, and just not...real enough. So I'm now having to go and work around the problems within the illustration digitally. (I'll eventually post the drawing once I work through said issues)

But as I was driving near downtown one day, it occurred to me that the best way to work around this problem is to actually draw skyscrapers, and fortunately for me, Minneapolis is blessed with a wide variety of these. So I went out with a sketchbook and came back with these:

The point of this exercise wasn't to draw a refined architectural drawing. It was to capture the form and shape of these buildings, to construct them within my own style. They aren't about details or accuracy, but about impressions.
The drawing on the right was done first, and you can tell I ran into some problems. The building has a combination of curved and sharp lines, and from my vantage, these blended together. The drawing on the left has a similar building, and draw out the combination more explicitly.
These sketches are really a form of note-taking, a reference for future work. In the drawing above, the right side had a pattern of windows that repeated itself row after row. I drew the first 3 rows, and decided that was all I needed. If this was a finished drawing, all the rows would be drawn, but it's an observational sketch, so it was a matter of capturing the essentials, and then moving on to the next drawing.
The last one I drew, and my favorite. The front of the building has this amazing cacophony of blocks upon one another, with half cylinder layers going up the center. Definitely a building that I'll give a second look at down the road.

More to come. Stay tuned.