A Night on the Town

I'd been considering doing something like this for years. I did in fact do one of these as a sketch about 10 years ago, but since then my attempts at doing Lower Manhattan from this classic angle with the Brooklyn Bridge in the foreground never seemed to satisfy me. However, last week I finally decided I'd hit this particular nail on the head, and this is the result.

Surprisingly, doing this particular work was very fun and quite therapeutic to do. Basically starting with a black outline of the city, I pretty much went from building to building to add the lights, then smudged them to give them a pleasing glow effect similar to that of an old picture rather than being too crisp. Then simply superimposing onto a pre-prepared late-evening sky and the result, to my mind, is better than I'd hoped for.