John Street, Then and Now
At the beginning of the summer I was fortunate enough to be commissioned by the Toronto Entertainment District to do a series of illustrations celebrating the neighbourhoods rich history. The final pieces were going to be printed on larger sheets of durable vinyl and installed down John St.
My concept was to treat some of the more famous events as vintage brands, and create a series of logos or seals with the date of the event, and some abstract images. i wanted passers by to kind of have to figure it out, I wanted people to stop and talk about the events and what they remember about them. For example, 92/93 World Champs is referencing the back to back World Series Champion Toronto Blue Jays.
Started with very loose sketches. I planned out 20 rough ideas, and then pick the best 12 concepts before moving toward liner drawings and ultimately deciding on the final 9 for the series.
Pencil work is starting to get tighter as I start moving closer to tighter compositions and concepts.
Late Great Movies will be made up of TV and Movie accessories, mixed into the Toronto skyline. After my sketch is basically sorted I started redrawing the elements in Adobe Illustrator.
Even though the artwork is going to be printed digitally – and I dont have to actually screen print anything – I cannot help but think and design like it will be traditionally printed. With this restriction in mind, I maintain a strict limitation on colour. I always plan everything out in greyscale and apply colour last, but even in grey scale I limit everything to 3-4 tones. I pick colours last because I feel the right colour can make anything look good, so Im always afraid applying colour too early will make me feel like things are finished or working really well before they actually are. I feel like if I can make it look great with grey, it will look even better later.
Here is an example of how even in grey scale, I spend a lot of time considering contrast and tonal relation.
Because these 9 illustrations are likely going to be scene as a group, I not only kept the colour scheme the same on all of them, but made the extra effort to balance the colours the best I could. I didnt want too many blue ones, or 5 black and red ones - I wanted all 9 to work together as one if viewed together.
The city did a great job with production and instal, the colours and detail looked very true to my digital files.
