This past Friday I set up my first merch table ever! I'm super excited to start this new endeavor, and happy to start with a small inventory. Right now I'm just selling my Phoenix Wheel posters. Even with just one night out, I learned a lot. One of things I got to chat about was how I drew the images on all three posters.
It looks complicated and technical— how do you even begin to draw something like this? Step one was research!
I started by looking for books on ferris wheels. Turns out the singular book with all the information I was looking for was at the Asbury Park Library. It is called Ferris Wheels: An Illustrated History by Norman Anderson. I borrowed it and took photos of about 40 pages of information that was relevant to my project. It even had an elevation drawing of the Phoenix Wheel, which proved critical to the next step.
Step two, build a 3D model! I grabbed a copy of Shapr3D on my iPad and started modeling. This wasn’t a perfect model that could one day be animated, this was a quick For Placement Only (FPO) model that was going to help me visualize all the angles that I would need.
My 3D model
Once the model was built, I exported images of the different angles with the various parts like the cars or supports toggled on and off. This allowed me to bring it into Photoshop and start drawing on top of the 3D model. It looks like tracing, but it isn’t. Remember I said this was a quick model, right? Well there were parts where things weren’t lining up right that needed to be fixed, and other parts that lined up right but ended up not looking super great when tangents all ran into each other. In both cases, I adjusted my drawing of the wheel to make things work from a technical standpoint and from a design standpoint. It’s never just tracing. It’s always decision making.
The Wheel drawing in progress
The wheel has a ton of detail, and a lot of it was left off of the first and third posters. It would have been too overwhelming to draw, let alone look at. I was able to work more of that detail back in on the second poster since it’s a close up of just part of the wheel.
The second poster, Heyday, also heavily referenced the details found in the 1978 photos by John Margolies. These are high resolution slide images that contained a wealth of information on how all the little intricate pieces fit together.
John Margolies 1978
All of these things worked together to allow me to draw the Phoenix Wheel in a believable, real way.