Instant Subway Ad Street Art

Professionals are paid thousands of dollars to design the fine advertisements that grace our fair city's subways. The hard work and the ingenuity of the advertisers is demonstrated every day through the quality and quantity of messages and images that bombard us on every step of our daily journey. But just because these qualified men and women are at the helm of our visual media doesn't mean you can't take a crack at it too. In actuality, every well-crafted advertisement is a direct invitation to the viewer encouraging them to take part in the design process. Here's how

For this project you will need:
One roll of plain white contact paper. (The longer the roll and more opaque the paper the better your results will be)
Oil based paint markers ( Sharpie paint pens work fine, metallic colors work especially well)
A printer
A digital camera
Digital image editing software
Scissors
An accomplice

Step 1 Choose Your Ad

No matter who you are or what you do, certain advertisements will appeal to you specifically. Maybe they're the ads that feature that overrated, under talented irritating celebrity you love so much. Or perhaps they're the ones that constantly remind you that your fashion sense leaves much to be desired and will continue to impede your progress with the opposite sex until said product is purchased. Either way, something is bound to pop out at you on your daily commute to the job that is slowly degrading the very fiber of your soul. So when one does, take 5 minutes out of your schedule and snap a picture of it. That's what I did with these two below:

Comments

[ilpug]

this is rad. id would stikc with smaller ads though. getting arrested is not a good career choice.

[BATKENYAN]

hahaha ill stick with my stickers but your good, your good:)

[Doldrum]

I love this approach. i think I might talk to a few friends about this ;) Thanks for the awesome idea!

[KelvinAlf]

awesommmmeeeeee i'm 16 and i'm getting really serious in graphic design so i might take a stab at it(no pun at chris rock's poster)

[noremakk]

step 2 is really a doozy. You just kind of say "go be artistic with photoshop." What filters did you use? How did you choose which details to keep and which to toss? How long did it take you? How much did you do by hand/mouse versus automatically done by photoshop's many filters and effects?

[jjacobs17]

I didn't use any filters. I traced over the original images with a tablet =) and kind of just made alterations as i went. I also referenced a lot of original stained glass art to try and match that look. Each separate illustration took about 30 min for me to do. You could probably use the live trace tool in illustrator or the bitmap trace function in flash or the posterize filter in photoshop to archive a similar vectorized illustrated look if that's what you're going for. I would recommend manually altering the images a bit to simplify them after using these methods.

[noremakk]

Thanks, I'll get right on it!

[selenamarie.draco]

Wow This all takes tagging to a whole new level. A higher power, if you will. Haha. I am impressed. I love the halos, too btw.

[solarson0617]

why do you put circles on their heads

[jjacobs17]

They're supposed to be halos mimicking a stained glass style.

[Hombre3000]

What about the security cameras?

[jjacobs17]

This kind of thing, while technically vandalism is relatively harmless and not permanent. If you get caught on tape and prosecuted as a result of something like this, I would be surprised. That being said, there's always some element of risk in doing art in the public sphere, but i think it's pretty low in this case.

[static]

I really don't care much about what happened to the original. Respectfuly I don't get your raggin on about another's public display and you create and install your own public display. Then I live out here in the sticks where billboard advertising is rare.

[Hombre3000]

Agreed. Especially for something not-that-offensive like this. At least it's clean and well-done.

[usanoisecorp]

nice work man, i like the holyness look of it

[skymutt]

(removed by author or community request)

[Nav]

Art is anything you can justify. You, like everyone else here can be no judge of what "valid art" is. Your probably one of those design students who think they can make edgy adverts so you can drop some knowledge on all us non artisit vandles.

[Kiteman]

Dude, this is not a piece of original artwork that has been defaced, it's not even a limited-run print. It is one, mass-produced, short-lived, little-seen poster that has been enhanced.

The message of the original poster has not been hidden, it has not been changed. If anything, it has been enhanced.

I would lay money to beans that, if the film company had found out about this project, they would have been glad of the extra publicity for the films. Any TV coverage would be guaranteed to contain studio-provided clips of the film, and ticket sales would only have improved.

[Kiteman]

(Sorry, two posters, out of the uncounted thousands that are stuck up every year, and most of which are simply ripped, torn or tagged before being covered up by the next posters)

[jjacobs17]

I appreciate your feedback. While I can sympathize with overworked designers, my intention for this piece was not to criticize commercial designers themselves but rather the industries of mass media as a whole.
There's a very strong artistic tradition of re-purposing existing objects and imagery to create new work. Furthermore, creating art in the public space is essential in that it produces work that is accessible to people who are outside of the conventional art institution. I think that artists and other media makers have a responsibility to reclaim the public space as a realm of independent expression, because this expression is so often denied. My project, while not groundbreaking by any means, was an attempt to turn a form of one-way communication into a two way conversation. We're constantly bombarded with messages via commercial media and usually we are provided with no venue for response or criticism. This project circumvents these restrictions and tries to do it in a manner which is light hearted and fun. Destruction was never the goal of this piece. If you're interested in my intent behind the imagery I chose, you can read the statment about this piece here http://jenniferj.net/blog/?p=14#intent

also, as to how i would feel if a piece of my work was modified by someone else, I accept that by placing any piece of art in a public space, it will be subject to modification by other people, in a lot of ways that's the best part of the process. If it was an intelligent and considered modification, even if it completely contradicted my original intentions for the piece I would be flattered.

[flyingace]

Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

[ewoodworker]

I respect your hard work. More importantly I respect your intelligence for seeing through all the media in our life that tries to eradicate our souls. Anyone that feels any sympathy for the original art work (ie. the ad), has not figured out that the media we face everyday is nothing more than an attempt at mind control. This is a great Instructable with good humor added!!

[humongo_spork]

can you recommend a low cost photo manipulation program that will get the job done?

[Toulouse]

for vector try inkscape

- - Awesome instructable by the way! I know what you mean about advertisements during your day the destroy the fiber of your soul... awesome work!

[TheMadTinker]

Or Paint.NET, which is also free.

[Kier]

You might try Gimp. It is free.

[cornflaker]

Paint.net is easier to use

[micronxd]

and for this, inkscape is best to use

[cornflaker]

Probably is, didn't actually read into this one that deeply...

[teamcoltra]

I love it, for sooo many reasons but the best reason is your not doing anything malicious (well... thats up to interpretation) You are just changing the advertisement.. and if it DID get some attention you are only helping the people you did this to.

[Sighted]

Very nice, great idea :D

[T3h_Muffinator]

Wow! Neat! My aunt did subway art a while back (guerrilla, of course), but that involved epoxying her pieces to the subway walls. This seems like a really awesome way to get a message out! Perhaps something will pop up in the Kendall square station (on the "T") soon enough>>

[Tystarr]

Which station was that?

[jjacobs17]

Nassau in greenpoint.

[ravebot]

very nice i got a set of pray paint stencils this size for Christmas but i'm thinking that i like your idea better

[caitlinsdad]

Ha, this makes the people who do graffiti and only draw mustaches or black out a tooth seem like amateurs. It would be fun if you did a video of you bombing the ad and capturing the non-expression of native New Yorkers and transit workers. I hope to see your work sometime, it's good for a laugh.

[fungus amungus]

You wearing a Chrome bag in that last pic? Nice.

[inventorjack]

Impressed! This instructable is great. Thanks for sharing.

[volquete]

awesome!

[Kiteman]

Very nice!

Did you get any reaction shots from people who saw the posters after you added the extras?

How long did they last?