My illustration Paint In the Street is included in a new group exhibition of images at the London Transport Museum.
Organised by the Association of Illustrators and the London Transport Museum, the show contains the work of 100 selected creatives who have all responded to the idea of a London story. This might be an historical event, a local legend, a scene from literature or even a narrative of the artist’s own creation. This last approach is how I came up with my poster Paint In The Street.
The image depicts the moment when a delivery driver accidentally spills an order of paint across a busy London street. Typically, the Londoners fail to stop or negotiate the mess and carry on their respective journeys, leaving an attractive (almost abstract) trail of colour across the road. The spillage never happened in reality, but I think this image draws attention to the deliberate and random road markings we can see all over London’s transport networks.
Me at the London Transport Museum at the opening of the London Stories exhibition.
The image was created first with acrylic paint on a board. I built up a series of textures using a variety of brush strokes, splashes and flicked paint to help create the backdrop of pavement, kerbstone and tarmac road surfaces. In order to get the crisp, bold shapes for the lines, paint and characters, I used Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and merged the whole thing together, adding more shading and colour.
Some people have not noticed immediately what is happening in the scene. My mum thought the splashes of paint were strange bodies in the road, for instance, and others have liked the abstract shapes only to see the figures and tyre tracks later. Looking at it now, I think the paint spills remind me of Matisse’s paper cut-outs but I hadn’t planned that at the start - you can’t escape your influences!
Poster Prize for Illustration 2019 – an exhibition of 100 artworks on “London Stories”
London Transport Museum, Exterion Media Gallery, Covent Garden, London
Open 8 February – 14 July 2019
London Transport Museum, Covent Garden Piazza, London, WC2E 7BB, United Kingdom
#LondonStories