Hasta La Ideas

Illustrator Chris Dent has drawn a cityscape mural featuring iconic landmarks from eight locations for AOL’s London office.

Dent’s mural represents the eight cities AOL is based in and features 15 landmarks from London, New York, Paris, Toronto, Madrid, Stockholm, Berlin and Copenhagen, including the CN Tower, the Empire State Building, the Shard and the Eiffel Tower.

“It was important to have a variation of architecture within the piece to provide balance but also to make it visually stimulating for the people seeing it every day,” says Dent.

“The process for the AOL piece was very much similar to my normal working process, just on a much larger scale: I collage together a landscape on the computer, then work it into a sketch which forms the base of my final drawing.

“All of my work is hand drawn with rapidograph pens, which are extremely delicate but for this piece, I had to use posca pens, which are obviously thicker and more durable,” he adds.

Dent has specialised in architectural and cityscape illustrations since graduating from Camberwell College of Arts in 2006. “Ever since visiting New York as a child, I have been fascinated by the workings of cities and how they adapt to the world we live in. As much as I find cityscapes beautiful to look at, it’s the construction of buildings and their context which gives me such a passion for this subject,” he says.

He has previously worked with AOL on smaller-scale canvases and was commissioned by the AOL Artists programme, an initiative that funds original art, exhibitions and installations. The programme recruits a different guest curator each month and now has a collection of 150 artworks – you can see more of them on the AOL Artists website.