Chelsea Hotel for A Circus Mind

Hotel Chelsea is a historic building in New York. It hosted countless numbers of famous musicians, artists, and writers. One of the more notorious stories connected with the Chelsea is about Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols and his girlfriend Nancy. Sid woke up to find Nancy dead from a stab wound on the bathroom floor and he wasn't sure what had happened the previous night. Drugs were involved and I'm sure that didn't help!

I've drawn them here together with some pretty intense red lighting. I wanted to contrast the lighting with the tenderness they must've shared during better times. 

A couple of distinctive features of the hotel including the vertical "HOTEL" sign and the ornamented iron balconies, which I made sure to depict in the illustration. I also checked out the hotel on Google Street View and saw what the building on the other side looked like and used that as a reference.

Here are the other Circus Mind illustrations I've done!

And sketches:

-- Julia

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