Medium blogs drafts

 How does urban painting differ from other types of paintings?

The urban painting shows the beauty of when artificial things blend into natural backgrounds and foregrounds. An artist can always play around with colors to make some elements more prominent than others in a painting. In urban painting, you may show nature as a prominent component and the buildings as non-prominent or vice versa. I love to show how nature and artificial structures can agree to create an effect that neither could produce alone. 

Urban painting is more about geometry and the shapes of houses, bridges, and monuments. Houses are tall and rectangular. The perspective matters. In painting about say, nature painting, you can use vibrant and bright colors. You are trying to portray the beauty of nature which is not symmetrical in general. But, in urban painting, you have to show the tallness or the grandiose nature of the buildings. It becomes a bit challenging because you have to work with block-like sketches and still play around with the effects of light and shade. 

If you say, paint a leaf, then any green stroke of the brush could be a leaf. But, not all rectangular strokes can be, say, houses. You have to remember about the depth of the house too. The way you move your brush in the urban painting becomes important which is not so in nature painting. 

You have to make the shapes look distinct from each other and blend into harmony in the urban painting. The exact geometry matters but the sharp edges have to blend into the sky which is natural. There is no urban painting without nature in the background. 

You have to be great at sketching lines because you cannot even use your ruler to draw straight lines in the urban painting. These lines need to look natural because that is how they appear to us.