Lately, I’ve found myself very inspired by all the gritty urban landscapes Toronto has to offer. Whenever I see someone selling paintings of picturesque woodlands, or lighthouses, or lakes, I always wish I could make a living doing that, only cooler. My attempt at this starts here, with my very first urban landscape painting, which is of Toronto’s very own St. Patrick Subway Station:
Not as grand as you expected, right? Well, I hope not anyways, because that’s just my initial sketch. This whole urban landscape painting thing is really new to me, and it was certainly a process. I learned a lot doing it, and although I’m very happy with the final results, I can’t wait to start on a second piece with all the knowledge I have from the mistakes I made this time.
So, I decided to do this painting on an 18″ x 24″ balsa wood panel. I decided on using acrylic paint and coloured pencils to accomplish the look I was going for. The main thing I wanted to capture was the grime and dinginess of St. Patrick Station. Here’s an early shot of the painting where you can see some of that grime coming together:
For most of Toronto’s subway stations, this would be pretty accurate, however, St. Patrick Station is a pretty horrid shade of green. I think it all used to be the same colour, but the grime has a way of dulling it in spots, and so it is inconsistently green now. For that reason, I wanted to give the subway panels just a hint of green:
At this point, things are starting to look pretty good as far as the actual subway tunnel is concerned, so I turned my attention over to the giant pillar on the right. It needs to be green (really, really, green), and a lot dirtier.
As you can see, the station is now unmistakably St. Patricks. The next thing I set out to do was to finish the signage. This was accomplished using coloured pencils, and I tried to match the font as well as possibly could. Interestingly, most of the signage in the TTC uses its own custom font. There are certainly exceptions, for example, anything lowercase is usually either Helvetica or Gil Sans, but anything all in uppercase (station names, for example) is a custom font that was obviously commissioned by the TTC some time ago. There appears to be two weights of this font in use right now, and after a bit of research, I found that the font is officially called “Subway Font” and appeared in the original stations at their opening in 1954. Unfortunately, no one seems to know who the original designer was, or exactly when it was designed. That said, I did my best to attempt to duplicate the fonts by hand:
As you can see, I also added in the beginnings of a soda can, some texture on the ground, and my own SKATE tag. At this point, only the signage lettering is coloured pencil, although that will change soon. The lettering was quite the challenge, but I think I captured it especially well in “St. Patrick”. From here, it was just a matter of putting my own finishing touches on the painting:
I used coloured pencil for the large “TREPANIC” graffiti tag in the tunnel, as well as many other small touches throughout. I should mention that, despite the grime, the TTC does a pretty good job of keeping the station graffiti-free, and the tags are non-existent in the actual station and are my own original creations. And that is how I painted St. Patrick Subway Station, from start to finish.
Take care,
Brian
Edited: May 12th, 2010
