New York New York
A City in Marks: Chaz Newton-Smith’s Hand-Drawn New York
In a world increasingly mediated by speed and automation, the deliberate pace of Chaz Newton-Smith’s process stands out. Eight years ago, after losing a part-time role as a youth worker—a job he valued—Newton-Smith found himself at a crossroads. Trained as an artist but working far from the studio, redundancy offered him something rare: time. He seized it, leaning fully into the pursuit of a creative life.
One of the first works to emerge from this period of transition is his intricate digital drawing of New York City, a work that vibrates with both precision and pulse. Created entirely by hand on Adobe Draw (now Adobe Fresco), the piece is, at first glance, almost photographic. The view is expansive—a dense tapestry of high-rises, stretching across the skyline toward the Empire State Building’s unmistakable spire. It’s the New York that many artists, from Edward Hopper to the modern street photographers, have sought to capture: grand, busy, inexhaustible.
Yet move closer to the piece and something shifts. What appeared to be photographic detail dissolves into a web of deliberate marks, each one laid down individually by Newton-Smith’s finger, long before the advent of the Apple Pencil. These marks—layered, angled, sometimes barely perceptible—reveal an entirely different New York. It is one shaped not by pixels but by patience, by the expressive act of mark-making that defines Newton-Smith’s style.
The piece took over 100 hours to complete, an act of endurance that mirrors the energy of the city itself. Every building, every shadow and reflective surface, has been crafted manually. And because the drawing is a vector, it can be scaled infinitely—printed the size of a postcard or a billboard—without losing the intimacy of its original touch.
The work quickly drew attention. After posting it to Twitter, Newton-Smith was contacted by Adobe itself, including the lead developer of Adobe Draw, who wanted to know how such a work had been created using only their tools. It was a small but telling moment: proof that even in the endless churn of digital art, craftsmanship and vision still stand out.
Newton-Smith, based in Stockport, England, joins a long tradition of artists—both British and New York-based—who find in the city’s architecture not just subjects, but metaphors. His New York is not the polished postcard version, nor is it reduced to gritty stereotype. Instead, it is alive with the tension between the monumental and the human, between the overwhelming scale of the city and the tiny, persistent marks that make it real.
In an era when AI can render a cityscape in seconds, there is something quietly radical about Newton-Smith’s approach. His drawing reminds us that a city, like a work of art, is built one mark at a time.
