Illustrating City Life for Apple
Every city has a rhythm that only locals know. When Apple invited Drawingzilla to illustrate the everyday life of São Paulo, Bangkok, and Shanghai for its global product events, each destination was researched through its habits, routines, and unspoken rituals, and translated into hand-sketched scenes born in a physical sketchbook before finding their place on the big screen. The drawings carry the warmth of the streets they came from, and at each event, guests were invited to complete them with color, turning personal observation into collective expression.
Client
Apple
Event
Apple Product Workshops
Countries
Brazil, China and Thailand
The first city was the one closest to home. São Paulo opened the series with some of its most iconic symbols, such as the Theatro Municipal and the "Piso Paulista", a wave pattern of its sidewalks, a daily backdrop so familiar it becomes invisible, until someone draws it. From these references, the illustrations expanded into scenes of paulistano life, each one beginning as a sketch in a physical notebook before being projected across two large facing screens, where linework and color met in front of the audience.
Edifício Copan took on a life of its own. From the earliest sketches, the building gained eyes, a mouth and expressions, some details that emerged naturally and stayed. A structure that has housed so many lives for so long already feels alive in the city's imagination, and the drawing simply made that visible.
Vídeo Evento
Food is not just sustenance in São Paulo, it is ritual. From the weekly feira to the mortadela sandwich and the brigadeiro, eating in this city has always been an act of belonging.
MASP, São Paulo's Museum of Art and one of the most iconic modernist buildings in Latin America, reflects across the lenses of a character's glasses, a detail that began as a compositional choice and became something more: an image of what it means to move through this city every day, with decades of modernist architecture mirrored in every glance.
The glasses are here again, but the reflection changed everything. Opening the Bangkok series, they mirror the city's most defining daily scene: its street food stalls, where the real life of Thailand has always taken place, loud, generous, and impossible to ignore.
Thailand lives between two kinds of beauty. The stillness of Maya Bay's turquoise waters and the controlled abundance of the Pak Khlong Talat flower market, one place where time slows, another where the day begins before dawn. Both made it into the drawings because both are irreplaceable.
When arriving in Shanghai, the dumplings are impossible to miss. Here, they appear with faces portraying eyes, expressions, a quiet personality of their own, because giving life to the inanimate has always been a natural part of the work. Small, round, and quietly expressive, they became characters in their own right, carrying the warmth and intimacy that street food has always held in Chinese culture.
Riding bikes, sipping boba tea, and playing with lanterns: some of the most quietly joyful rituals of everyday Shanghai, each one becoming its own illustration, and together painting a portrait of a city that knows how to find beauty in the ordinary.
