Latest Project - Railway Poster

My wife has asked me to make a replica of a 1930s style railway poster. She gave me a choice of three, and the one which won hands down for me advertised historic Shrewsbury.

Here's the preliminary sketch onto canvas.

You'll notice that I didn't sketch in much more than the lettering, the border and the outline of the buildings. The point was that this was all I wanted to do before I painted in the cream background colour, although I did use an ink pen to write in the black lettering. The idea was that these would show through a couple of layers of the background paint, and then I could go over them again. Here's the picture after my first painting session:-

I was quite happy with the cream background, but not so happy with the border. I like the darker crimson lettering of the word Shrewsbury, but there's only one layer of paint on them at the moment, and so they are rather streaky. The plan is that I'll apply at least one other layer to the letters as one of the last touches.

My plan was to tidy up the outer edge of the border on Wednesday in the artists' group session. However, I arrived to find I'd left a couple of important pieces of painting equipment behind me. So I used the time to sketch in as much detail on the buildings as I needed.

There was so little of the session left by the time I'd finished sketching in the buildings that there wasn't any point going back to fetch equipment, so I finished the session a little early.

So in tonight's session I began by painting the outer edges of the border a lot more carefully, First of all I did a little remedial work with white paint, and when this was dry it made a good base for overpainting with the same cream as the background. Once I was happy - or happier - with the border, then I began to paint in the buildings, firstly some of the lighter cream and then some of the roofs , shadows and wooden beams. This is where I am with the painting now.

Allowing for the way my camera tends to bend images slightly, you should be able to see the border at least looks a lot tidier now.