Hello all lover’s of behind the scenes and DVD commentaries, welcome to another edition of collaboration station! Today’s inside story centers around the delightful Brett Weber aka bsweber’s second collaboration with me, “Impossible City.”

The story begins about eight months ago when Brett emailed me up and asked if I wanted to collaborate with him again. Treating the email with the enthusiasm of a person who just picked a four leaf clover that was hiding underneath a head’s-up penny next to a two-ton horseshoe, my lucky day couldn’t have been more complete with the news of a new collab with the one and only bsweber. Brett has the talent to make stick figure full of life and emotion and is never one to shy away from epic drawing projects, so I sent him one and only one concept I had that seemed like the perfect picture for him to bring to life:


“Skyscrapers are Making Holes in the Ozone Layer.” AKA Impossible City- Or just ripping holes in the sky..this could get very imaginative. Possibly buildings could be drawn like they are ripping through the fabric of the tee, disappear, and then reappear through another drawn hole towards the top of the design, sort of how a push-pin goes through fabric. We could have some skyscrapers going every which way, possibly MC Escher in style or something even more scattered and multi-directional, being bent and going "through" the shirt to the other side, where maybe people on the other side could be walking left to right, around or over the skyscraper bulging out towards the viewer of the tee. Buildings could be piercing holes through clouds who have run out of air and are flying around or crashing into other buildings as if they are balloons whose air has been suddenly let out. Possibly half the sun could be reflecting in front on one of the buildings, and the other half of the sun is seen behind the building going down, which is obviously impossible to have both the sun in front AND behind something. lol. Cars could be driving on roads or straight up the sides of buildings drawn quite nonchalantly. We could have a giant redwood tree the same size as one of the building, but drawn behind many of them so it is barely visible except for its top which sprouts above the rest of the epic skyline. We could also have a few of those tree limbs and such poking out of the back of the tee, with some roads and traffic patterns seen from a bird’s eye view going around the skyscraper and tree branches from that upwards perspective, shifting from the head on perspective of the front part of the tee. We would probably brainstorm a bit more about all the possibilities for this idea.


Brett was instantly intrigued. Or at least he told me so I would leave him be and let him create his vision of this concept for a while uninterrupted. A few days later Brett wrote me back and asked for some visual counterparts to the written words, so I gathered up all my drawing talent and humility, studied myself and let loose with a couple of drawings whose skill and beauty have not been equaled in all of the history of people drunkenly speed-drawing in games of Win, Lose Or Draw:









This was a great idea for Brett to give me, as it led to myself fleshing out some more ideas and little details for the sizes of buildings and more play on perspectives and back/front cohesion of the design. After about a month of pondering these chicken scratches on paper atop a hill made of porcupines, Brett emerged with a more concrete plan on how to make these random optical playthings into a living and breathing albeit imaginary metropolis by focusing on the oversized tree in the center of the design, and building the buildings out from that center.

Brett was in a faraway country when did the first sketch for this idea on a teeny tiny book he had with him to whittle away the hours of travel and sent it to me when he had his first chance to do so:



Even from this tiny, bite-sized morsel of the city and the main idea, I could tell Brett was on the same wavelength as I on the style of the project. The skyscraper jutting out in all directions before re-appearing out of thin air to a higher level was exactly the kind of off-kilter feel that just felt oh so right for this sub. I responded by telling him so, and inspired by his first go-through with the concept, I gave Brett some more details to work with, such as a possible skyscraper birdhouse hanging off the tree, and some more details regarding all the kinds of ways we can mutate and play with the illusion of the residents of this zany place and how its shadows can play a huge role of disorientation.

A few weeks passed and Brett got back to me with the first major sketch of the sprawling cityscape:





I was taken aback at how formed the whole world was even at this stage, like Brett couldn’t help but to make the sketch almost lived-in. Less than a week later, an even more completed piece was sent my way through the digital cable waves:



One of my more favorite parts of the project, that a skyscraper would actually appear to rip through the shirt it was on, was not only demonstrated at this point, but Brett clearly knocked the concept out of the stratosphere. The skyscraper on the right also took shape with Brett’s brilliant idea of having a mid-scraper aquarium built right into it!

At this point Brett sent my brain into overdrive for this project, and we discussed putting a cloud cover into the idea, from a man-made cloud, the fluffiness of a cumulus barely covering up the machine underneath belching away at provided cover for the city and its ever-present sun and moon system. At this time I also mentioned to Brett we could have antennae on top of a skyscraper or the tremendous tree that would cut up the sky like “a key on the side of a car.” We also discussed soon after if this would be a good entry into the LOLLAPOLOOZA contest, so you know it’s taken a good long while to bring this city up to final code!

A little over a month later I emailed Brett to see if he had made any more headway on the massive project, and replied that he had been secretly working on the design all the while leaving me in the dark for the last few weeks! What a nice guy, eh? Before I could lace an email with an overwhelming amount of q bert-ish expletives, Brett caught me way off guard with this exquisitely shaded and in-depth update:



A month or two later yielded this mockup of fully shaded glory with a compromise to the back part of the tee, which couldn’t fit a full a skyscraper through the back coming out like intended, but still had the subtle but powerful addition we were looking for:



A couple of days later some more people were added to the piece:



At this point, Brett was so tired of looking at his Simcity that he wanted to cast it off into the realm of forgotten paradise in the pages of history. I sent a warm cup of cocoa and a firm hand on the shoulder by way of an email with a bunch of more suggestions for cars, figures, and final push for some clouds above the trees and onto the back of tee, and mentioned to him that we’ve come this far it would be a shame not to bang it home at this point. Brett gave me the fist shaking of a lifetime but agreed with me, and mili-moments before the end of the Drawing contest, we got it submitted with some final touch-ups to this black and white metropolis!





It’s been sooooo gratifying to work on this with Brett and have someone with the talent, tenacity and vision to bring a gigantic project like this to completion scraping every ounce of inspiration and filling every nook and cranny with detail, and I am extremely proud of the work and time he put into making this Impossible City a definite certainty!