“Tokyo at Night” is DONE!

A series of ten watercolor illustrations portraying night Tokyo streets that I started painting in 2017. Painting in between other projects and commissions it took me more than a year to finish this project.

Instead of going for the obvious - cool looking, new built high rise offices I wanted to depict the night scenes of Tokyo that are not so widely seen - back streets, empty alleys, tall buildings and empty parking lots. Mostly brightly lit (even the sky is never just black) with no people, those places have a weird eerie atmosphere that I wanted to recreate.

We walk a lot with Kana - especially in the late evenings when it’s cooler and we finished the day’s work. I took a lot of reference photos of interesting night scenes when we were still living in Tokyo’s Waseda and used them to make this series of paintings.

This series follows a path from Kudanshita to Waseda through Kagurazaka.

And here are all the spots on a Google Map if you want to go and explore by yourself: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1WLufcU6-TNeHqBwDDC9_m1npAIMkdlGi&usp=sharing

This series is accompanied by making-of videos available on my YouTube channel (HERE) showing the painting process and the tools I used.

Technical details: * Paper: HOLBEIN Waterford natural 300g/m cotton paper * Sketch: Mitsu-bishi Hi-Uni pencil grade HB * Line: COPIC Multiliner SP 0.5mm * Colors: my main Schmincke set (see the tools section)

Additionally, I used the airbrush in some of the later pieces to get some additional depth and shadows. I’m showing more about this technique in the making-of videos.