Devon Streetscape (1536-1556 W. Devon)

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Below is another graphic developed for the storefront exhibit planned for installation at Clark Devon Hardware.  An interesting block, even with some odd changes over the years.  The third building from the right suffered a couple of big fires in the 1940s and had a architectural slipcover installed on the facade.  I'd give a lot to know if the original details are still under there.

Horizontally oriented images never lend themselves to the vertical blog format. I've been trying to find a viewer which allows an image to scroll past, but everything I find takes a bit more expertise than I'm willing to develop.

The above drawing was developed by stringing together a series of digital images in Photoshop, which was then used as a reference to develop a line drawing with Micron disposable technical pens.  This was colored with cool grey Prismacolor markers, and then with Prismacolor pencils. Before I began to use this technique all of my color images looked painfully cheerful.  But starting with grey is a good way to develop the earth tones commonly found on old buildings.

This image was developed from the birds-eye aerial photos accessible through the Bing search engine.  I didn't have the gumption to color this, but maybe I will at some point... The two work well together to give a quick sense of the block.

Just as a side note, the historical information was taken from the ancient building permit files on microfilm, available at the Harold Washington Library, the UIC Library, or the Chicago History Museum.  These only go up to 1954, so I estimated the date of the annex on the left.