How To Design Your Own Cityscape

2. Edit Photo

<<-- 1. Find A Photo ---
3. Design Skyscrapers -->>

Use your favorite image editor (GIMP, Paintshop Pro, etc) and adapt your chosen photo to your needs. For example, I needed to make the sky black and experiment with placement of the Chrysler building. For a while, I was experimenting with placement of the Twin Towers closer to the foreground. And ultimately I inserted a building very close to our viewpoint for an added depth effect.
I suggest that you do *all* of your experimentation on the computer. It takes way more time to re-carve out all those windows if you screw up on wood.
With modern editing programs you can assign buildings to layers and easily move them around to get the arrangement just right. Make some features more obvious.. such as windows in the photo that aren't very clear. You'll need to use your eye and imagination to create any detail that may be missing from the photo. Notice that I added more floors below those featured in the original photograph.

By creating a crude cardboard cutout of the city outline, I determined that I needed to model the lower floors for when my guests would approach the kitchen sink and look down.

Finally, place a grid over your final design. I imported the image into AutoCAD, scaled it to be actual size, and then placed a grid of 2" x 2" lines over it. You'll use this grid to transition the design to wood.

<<-- 1. Find A Photo ---
3. Design Skyscrapers -->>

© 2002 Ryan Hoagland