Turning Summer to Winter

On Sunday, the newspaper brought with it the new City Creek Center Holiday insert, so now that it is public, I figured it was time for me to claim credit. I was approached in late August to do illustrations for City Creek Center, the new multi billion dollar redevelopment project in downtown Salt Lake City, UT.

Concept art provided by the client

Of course I jumped at the chance since the mall and surrounding properties are practically in my back yard. The development spans multiple city blocks and there is a distinctive pedestrian bridge that connects it together. One of the images needed would showcase this architectural feature. the time frame and complexity of the architecture, as well as the continuity with existing City Creek advertising necessitated a much more Photoshop based approach than usual. I also would need to transform summer into winter, complete with twinkling lights and snow and decorations.

Left side of the panorama

Center section with sky cut out

Right side of the scene

I took the concept art from the client and took photos around the mall from which to work. I could not get the entire bridge panorama into my camera in one shot, so I pieced the three parts together using the photo merge utility, which us incredibly good at matching things up. I then adjusted exposures to get them all matching and then went to work painting over the entire scene.

City Creek Bridge- Final version

City Creek bridge starting point

Then came all the work of adding the holiday cheer to the scene. I added a nice moonlight sky and stars to the background, edited out the power poles and barricades, replaced all the people with bundled up shoppers, added all the garlands and trees and tossed in thousands of twinkling lights. I also added a generous sprinkling of snow on the ground and light flakes falling. By the time I finished, I had painted over and added textures to pretty much the whole scene. I like how it turned out, though it was not my traditional method of working. Bottom line was that the client was very pleased and that is what really counts.