Empire State of Pen by Patrick Vale

London-based artist and illustrator Patrick Vale did not invent the idea of drawing New York. He did something more specific in 2012: he planted himself on the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building, looked south over lower Manhattan, and built the skyline mark by mark in pen while an iPhone, fixed to a makeshift rostrum, recorded the accumulation. The finished drawing and its time-lapse film travel under the title Empire State of Pen—a pun that stuck because it is accurate. The work is less a postcard view than a long act of attention.

When the short film circulated that summer and autumn—through architecture blogs, culture sites, and social shares—it offered something viewers rarely get from a finished cityscape: proof of labor. Buildings arrive as scratches, then as masses, then as a readable island. Charles Mingus’s “Moanin’” often rides under the cuts, giving the stop-motion a jazz pulse that matches the city’s density without turning the piece into a travel ad.

What you are looking at

The vantage is architectural, not tourist-casual. From the Empire State Building looking south, the Flatiron sits in the near field; bridges—Brooklyn and Verrazzano among them—anchor the eastern edge; Jersey City’s skyline, including the Goldman Sachs Tower of that era, flanks the west; and the rising One World Trade Center / Freedom Tower development marks the southern narrative of a skyline still mid-rebuild. Vale’s line does not smooth those facts into a logo. It keeps the mess of roofs, water tanks, and overlapping silhouettes that make Manhattan hard to summarize in one glance.

Contemporary write-ups stressed the freehand nature of the work. This is not a traced photograph or a CAD export dressed as art. The line is willfully scraggly in places—imperfect without tipping into cute doodle territory—which is why architecture audiences responded so quickly. The drawing behaves like a thinking hand moving across a city that refuses to sit still.

How the film was made

Vale has described the drawing as a multi-day effort—on the order of four to five days of work, compressed into roughly eighty seconds of finished time-lapse. Production folklore around the piece is charmingly low-tech: one week of attention, a handful of pens, a pencil, too much tea, one iPhone, and the repetitive strain that comes from drawing a metropolis at that density. The phone was duct-taped or otherwise fixed to a rostrum so the frame would hold while the paper filled.

That constraint matters. A locked camera turns drawing into a performance of patience. Viewers watch empty paper become geography. The pleasure is partly suspense—when will the bridges appear? when does the harbor clarify?—and partly craft education. Students of illustration can pause the film and study how Vale builds mass: light scaffolding first, then denser hatching, then the darks that lock a tower into space.

Why architects and illustrators shared it

ArchDaily, Architizer, Open Culture, and other design-adjacent outlets amplified Empire State of Pen because it sits at a useful intersection. It is representational enough for people who love skyline recognition, and process-forward enough for people who care how images get made. Architizer’s note that the line work is imperfect without being whimsical remains one of the sharper early assessments: Vale maps geography; he does not cartoon it.

There is also a simple human reason the film traveled. Watching someone finish a hard thing in accelerated time is a reliable internet genre. Vale’s version happens to be beautiful and specific. It is not “artist draws anything”; it is “artist draws this exact southern Manhattan from this exact altitude,” which gives the viral object a documentary spine.

Patrick Vale’s practice around the piece

Vale’s wider body of work—city drawings of London and Florence among them—treats urban form as something to be inhabited on paper rather than reduced to icons. Empire State of Pen became a career hinge partly because the video made the studio process public. Print editions followed: giclée reproductions in a limited run have been offered through his shop, extending the drawing’s life beyond the screen for people who wanted the still image on a wall.

It is worth separating the film from the print without ranking them. The film teaches rhythm and construction. The print rewards slow looking—finding a bridge, a pier, a cluster of midtown blocks you know from street level. Either way, the authorship stays with Patrick Vale: London-based illustrator, animator, and draftsman whose New York piece became an early-2010s reference point for pen-and-ink city portraiture online.

Reading the skyline as subject

Drawing New York from the Empire State Building is an old ambition with new tools. Earlier generations used sketchbooks and memory; Vale added a fixed phone and a shareable timeline. What remains constant is the problem: the city contains more detail than a single session can honor. Vale’s answer is accumulation. Thousands of small marks become a portrait not because any one line is miraculous, but because the aggregate refuses to quit.

That approach has ethical quietness. The film does not claim to own Manhattan. It claims to have looked carefully from one window for several days. In a media environment that often flattens cities into drone spectacle, a hand-drawn southern view feels almost intimate—an alien-in-New-York story, as one British paper put it, that earns a welcome by doing the work.

How to watch it now

If you revisit the time-lapse, try three passes:

• First pass, sound on. Let Mingus (or whatever soundtrack your upload carries) set the tempo; watch for the moment empty paper tips into recognizable city.
• Second pass, mute. Track Vale’s order of operations—foreground masses before distant haze, structure before ornament.
• Third pass, freeze frames. Identify Flatiron, the harbor edge, Jersey’s western wall, and the downtown rebuild. Treat the drawing as a map you can quiz yourself against.

Comparisons to other famous New York draftspeople occasionally surface in comment threads. Those comparisons are usually about awe, not equivalence. Vale’s contribution in 2012 was not a memory palace drawn after a helicopter ride; it was a sustained observational sit, recorded as it happened, shared as both artwork and evidence of attention.

What lasts

Empire State of Pen still works because its premise is humble and its execution is not. Sit high. Look south. Draw until the island coheres. Compress the days into a minute and a half so strangers can feel the weight of the hours. For anyone who sketches cities, the piece remains a useful dare: pick a real vantage, accept the chaos of roofs, and let pen time do what a single heroic outline cannot.

Prints and reuploads will keep circulating; the useful habit is to return to the process, not only the final skyline glow. The Empire State Building has hosted countless photographs. Vale’s pen version survives because it shows the skyline being earned, inch by inch, from a window that most visitors only use for a minute of looking.