Mount Royal Street and new Station, Orange Line Metro

It's been awhile since I went out to a metro station to make a painting. For those of you who are new to my blog, there is a page dedicated to the 68 stations of the Montreal Metro series that I completed towards the end of 2021. A few of the stations were under construction at the time, amazingly some of them still are under wraps such as Jolicoeur, McGill and Rosemont. Mont Royal was finally finished and unveiled recently so I decided to go out and take a look. When I got to Mount Royal street, it was closed off to cars due to a street sale. Montreal closes off certain streets in the summer so that local vendors can get a lot of foot traffic and sell food and wares on the streets. Looking down Mount Royal you see the top of the big Olympic stadium on the horizon. I set up my bike studio in the middle of the street, and a few people stopped and commented positively on the painting and remarked on my bike-studio setup. Since my drawing skills are minimal, I just went ahead and sketched out some humanoid forms using paint, then filled them in with interesting colours I pulled from the crowd. In the distance, the crowd is just a mosaic of colour and value daubs but it created a good illusion of depth. 

Street Sale Mount Royal, watercolour 5 x 7" cold press, July 2023 (No. 3485a)

The station turned out to be a cube of glass and steel with a grassy knoll on the roof with a skylight. It was surrounding by an enormous array of interlocking bricks and some large tree planter areas. Today due to the crowds, there was a street performer doing some silly show while curious onlookers watched on. As I painted I could hear the show man, he spent 10 minutes announcing that he would do a show and building up anticipation, then he did a back flip over a volunteer and asked everyone for money. Anyways, at least it cause people to stay mostly still for once. The people were an important part of the composition, their forms connect the background elements of the metro station and the green kiosk with the painted road in the foreground. The bright red shirt also provided a good depth illusion. You will notice the absence of feet on the people, I tried in a few places but it looked atrocious and wiped them off. The overall effect is still strong, none the less, just need to practice figure drawing to improve these kinds of crowd scenes.

People watching Street Show, Mount Royal Station,  watercolour 7 x 10" cold press, July 2023 (No. 3611)