On The Noir Train

 

"Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" is arguably my defining mantra, so keen an environmentalist am I...

...actually that's complete bullshit.  I'm no better or worse on the environmental front than the average humanoid I'd say.  But with my latest work, I did find a way to recycle some old parts that were hanging around, and as such probably saved the world from the manufacturing and shipping of at least one standard-sized canvas.  Baby steps.

The piece is entitled "On the Noir Train", and it is a composite of about ten or so of my previous paintings.  I had always felt that I had enough elements from my various works, plus the requisite skills in Photoshop, to create a completely new (digital) painting from scratch.  And so I set off...

First and foremost, I knew the dominant element of the new piece would be the train, and that everything else would need to be built around that.  So I started with the painting "Newmarket Station".

I cut out the train and the accompanying tracks and snow, which would ultimately dictate the perspective of the final work.  I also kept the parked rail car to the left of the train, since I wanted the new scene to take place in a rail yard.

I used Photoshop to add a glow around the train light, plus I cloned and sized-up the smoke, which I felt could have been a bit beefier in the original.

The next most important element was going to be my lead character.  For this I looked to a much older work, "Heading Home", as I thought the man in that painting would have the sufficient gravitas to be a foil to the train.

I cut him out and placed him in the lower left, which was pretty much my only option, based on the train.  Using Photoshop, I added a strong highlight on his right side to suggest him being lit by the lamp of the approaching train.

I should also note that I copied/pasted some other peeps from my other railyard paintings to serve as background characters.  

But in the end, the Alex Colville in me decided to limit the scene to a solitary man-vs.-locomotive scenario, and the extras got the axe.  

I'm a firm believer that artistic things tend to work in threes, and so for my third element I grabbed the unfinished Commerce Court tower that was in my previous piece "Bay Car to the Docks".

I used both the tower and the large grey midground building, though I patched out the grid work on top in part to get rid of the Canada reference, but also to save having to cut out all the minute diamond shapes...a step which would have been necessary to allow whatever sky I chose to show through.

I also bumped up the lighting on the tower to make it pop out against the sky.   I felt like the one large building, as opposed to a skyline full of towers, gave the piece more of a generic industrial town feeling, like a Cleveland or Buffalo.  

Now I had my three main elements.  It was time to fill in the gaps, starting on the left side.

I grabbed two components from the following paintings.  The lit brick wall from "A League is Born"...

...and the heavy wooden door from "the Speakeasy".

With a bit of tweaking and colour correction, I created the bricked structure behind the man.

I didn't want just a bunch of square structures in the yard, so from the painting "Broadway Night"...

...I grabbed onto the snow-covered awnings on the right hand side, flopped them, and added them beside the boxy structure.

To close off that side, I added the tops of the buildings from "An Evening on Portage Avenue" to the upper left.

Finally came the time to add in the sky.  I monkeyed around with a few skies from my earlier paintings, but in the end decided to cheat a bit and grab one from a photo I took at a cottage.  I needed a decent sized swath of sky to cover the width of the file, and even as such, I had to patch it together, anticipating that the foreground buildings would hide the seams.

I remember it was at the point when I added the sky that suddenly the piece really started to work for me.

Even though in hindsight the elements came together well, it took a lot of twisting, turning, and experimenting to get all these objects from disparate sources with different perspectives to mesh into a cohesive whole.  The sky seemed to pull it all together and provide the 'glue' for all these floating objects.

All that remained was to plug some gaps in the middle ground.  

I felt the rail yard could use some more elements.  So from a much older painting, "Dome Gas"...

...I grabbed the tanker car and added it in.

 Next I needed a chunk of fence to close off the yard from the background.

From my painting "The Curlers", I was able to latch onto a little chunk of fence that existed between the two men furthest away.

I cloned said piece and created a fence to close off the rail yard.

At this point I turned to my painting "Bryant Park" for help...

I took the three-story entranceway to the middle building and created a new longer, warehouse-type structure.

And then I grabbed another piece of Bryant, the background buildings on the right side, and filled in the lower right of my new piece.

The picture was entirely covered at this point, but time for one last indulgence...

From the above piece, "The Revue" I took the lamppost...

...and put it along the tracks beside the train, complete with an enhanced glow courtesy of Photoshop.

And finally, about half the elements in the new work had residual snow from their originating source, so I decided to add a layer of snow across the whole piece as a final unifying element.

And there you have it!  Something new born from the ashes of the old!  I'm thinking of doing similar projects by recycling other groups of my paintings that have thematic similarities.   

All in the name of the environment!

If you would like a print (the only option possible) of "On the Noir Train" please feel free to visit this link:

https://fineartamerica.com/featured/on-the-noir-train-dave-rheaume.html