I have always had a particular interest and love for the design of the London Tube Map, by Harry Beck, 1933. As I have been travelling back and forth between London, I have used the tube map and the tube itself many times over the last few weeks, and as well as my love for its iconic design (which is why I have included it in my archives) it ties in nicely with this current project 1.

As part of my project, I decided to use the tube map, or maps of London and Brighton as a base or background for my work, by drawing on top of them. I think with bold black lines this is successful, as it can be seen above all the colour and things going on underneath.

I tried this out in my sketchbook, and also looked at a few artists who had used maps as a basis in their works (e.g. Ed Fairburn) and I thought this was something I was going to take further/onto a larger scale, however I wanted to remove a large amount of colour from my project to make it less childish and to make more of a point of the architecture.

I definitely grew to create an expressive style and found the materials which worked best for me, charcoal, graphite and pen with collage and so I started to come out of the sketchbook but also tried paint. I really like the effect of the multimedia so decided on my favourite buildings and elements from the project, and also did some more research into London architecture (again touched upon in my archives) and created a rough composition in pencil on my page. From here, I worked loosely and with an open mind, and started to layer on materials. I used colour still as I wanted to keep the ‘vibrance’ factor of the cities but I narrowed down the palette in situ.