I Turn Cities I’ve Visited Into Death Stars

My name is Amer and I’m an architect, traveller and instagrammer based in London. I’ve been drawing a lot lately and have been fortunate to be able to travel quite a bit over the years. Occasionally I draw at work too.

But that increased tremendously this year – after quitting my job, travelled and came back failing to find another one! I started drawing cities inspired by my travels, NASA’s instagram images, my favourite artist Stephen Wiltshire and the Death Star this past summer.

The drawings show cities independently as if it were its own planet. I currently only draw cities I’ve visited and since Melbourne is a distance away from London yet extremely European in nature, I thought I’d try to relive its qualities through art. I’ve used Google Maps to recreate the perspective and lots of photos of the cities to confirm the skyline, get details etc. But I’ve also redesigned the layout of the city to make the composition work in my favour – I’ve reconfigured streets, added parks and buildings etc.

Luckily I’ve had some knowledge of this through my experience of being an architect and also my MA in Urban Design. Satisfied with the outcome, I drew a larger globe increasing its size from 360mm diameter to a 940mm version. The globe was too large to draw on the paper I had so it had to be cropped. One thing I wasn’t expecting were the amount of focus and time it takes to complete the work. Whenever I draw I have to imagine I’m drawing on a globe-shaped surface. The perspective distorts a lot and determining the scale from one building to another is very difficult.

The most challenging aspect is to see I’m only able to complete a small part of the globe every single day. And it never looks right until at least half of it is drawn. It took me about a week to draw and design the 360mm globe and about six weeks to do the cropped 940mm version. But the end product so far has been fantastic.

More info: Instagram