How to Paint a Simple City Scene

Co-authored by Virginia Kelley, MA

Last Updated: January 18, 2025

The best way to make any subject for art less complicated and intimidating is to simplify it. Most subjects can be reduced to basic geometric shapes. Elements of a cityscape vie for an artist's attention as if standing on a busy street corner - glass facades and street vendors, bustling sidewalks and flashes of urban greenery. Working with geometric shapes leaves room for you to embellish the scene however you see fit.

Steps

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1
Train yourself when looking at a city street scene to look beyond the details. Pick out rectangles and squares.
- We seek perfection and often being exact got us praise. That isn't necessarily the only or best way to do a complicated scene of buildings.
2
Pick up a round, pointed, small-to-medium-sized brush and black watercolor. Mix a puddle of diluted black pigment with water in the palette part of your paintbox. Or use a plastic picnic plate for mixing.

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It might take a little practice to get the right consistency for your colors to flow smoothly off your brush with little effort.
4
Practice doing long, straight vertical lines as well as sideways or horizontal lines. Try to fill your brush once and have the paint do a continuous and unbroken line. This is good practice in hand-eye coordination. It is also fun and rewarding.
5
Prepare to paint the scene by getting a new sheet of paper at hand. It ought to be heavy watercolor paper to avoid the paper buckling and being challenging to paint on. Test a piece out first by painting different-length vertical lines and allowing them to dry. Repeat by doing horizontal lines. Play with color, if you wish. Use a hairdryer to hasten the drying process. With watercolor it is best to allow a layer to get thoroughly dry before attempting to paint over it.
Everything lies in being able to control the water and paint ratio. Do pages of practice lines and shapes. Think as you work to figure out what is happening. Put aside experimental pages and let them dry. Watercolor gets fainter as it dries. In time you will learn how to adjust your paint to get the intensity you are seeking.
On a new page and using a 1 inch, flat brush, mix colors by diluting them with water on a plastic plate or in the mixing area of your palette. As you get a color mixed, charge up (or fill) your brush and paint vertical strokes. Go either from the top down or bottom upward. Aim for long, clean, consistently colored rectangles. If you forget or don't dry the shape completely, colors will leach into each other and blend. This is not a bad thing necessarily—it happens all the time with watercolor.
8
Return to the page of rectangles when dry and embellish them with windows. A ¼ or ½ in flat watercolor brush means you can do windows as small, short strokes. Or, draw the rectangles for windows in pencil and fill the shape in with a pointed brush loaded with color. Allow to dry thoroughly.
9
Stand up the dried piece and study it. Ideas will come to you for things to add. Consider these:
- People walking, people walking in groups, people walking dogs.
- Further embellishments to the building fronts. Patios, ornamental decorations and window grilles.
- Texture such as brick or stone to building fronts.
- Vendors for food, drinks, and pretzels.
10
Study cityscape for inspiration. Once you've finished your art piece, be on the lookout for buildings to study. It's not possible to have inside your head exactly what buildings look like.
- Use the internet and look up visual information.
- Add some vehicles, from bicycles to busses. Commercial vehicles have words on them.
- Look at the lines made by sidewalks. Putting sidewalk divisions all as vertical lines makes them appear as though they are standing upright. Instead, slant your sidewalk divisions.
- Add color with the clothes people are wearing and flower vendors.