Big John

This is a photo manipulation of a photo I took of the John Hancock Tower in downtown Chicago. It has a few nicknames but its affectionately known as BIG JOHN.

I wanted to to experiment with a manipulation of this photo that strongly emphasized the tower's most world famous design features - its triangular primry cross bracings that the Architect proudly displayed.

I removed the other neighbouring building from the photo and inserted layers of my own cloud textures behind the tower. I then added a sandstone texture layer from my private texture library overtop the entire manipulation to give the entire work a hard and almost Architecture blueprint pencil drawn look. I was going for black-white minimal hard cold steel structure feel. As such, I also applied a filter to the tower to further convert it to a pencil drawn appearance. I set levels so that the cross bracings were really standing out in the art.

I wanted the sky to be a different tone (used a tanned bown) to further offset the tower from its background.

If you want to see the original photo - its in my profile / gallery called "John Hancock". I would love to hear your opinions on which version you like more - the photo or the manipulation. Which would you buy and hang on your wall if you had to hang one.

CREDITS:
- All photos and photo textures (i.e. the clouds, sandstone) are my own photos from my private non-published stock of textures.
- This photo art is copyright (August 2011)