EmoriaCustom art prints and star maps
Maps · Collection 01

Toronto poster, drawn from the real map

43.6532°N / 79.3832°W · Canada

What breaks the fabric here is neither a river nor a hill: it is a set of green valleys branching down to the lake. They are empty, and they are empty by decision.

You choose the framing, the palette and the words of the caption. The work is drawn from real data, then printed to order in the workshop closest to you.

Compose my Toronto poster
What the map shows

A weave nothing stops, except empty valleys

Follow the green. On the right, a system comes down from the top of the sheet to the shore, dividing and rejoining as it goes; on the left, a second one does the same, thinner and less continuous. These are the ravines of the Don and the Humber, and they are the only thing here that interrupts the streets. Everywhere else the fabric runs edge to edge. On the detailed background, where every building fills in and the whole sheet takes on a fine even grain, these and the lake are what stay legible: the rest becomes a material.

Read on

At the bottom, past the shore, a long low arc of sand closes the harbour, with an airstrip laid along it. It was a peninsula until a storm cut through it in 1858, and it has been a group of islands since. A storm did here what took an act of parliament elsewhere on this lake. Note as well what the map withholds: the rail that converges on the centre is drawn too pale to read, and downtown declares nothing at this scale, no axis and no monument. The shape of Toronto is its shore and its valleys, and nothing else.

Compose your own

What suits Toronto

The palette

This is one of the few prints in the series where green genuinely matters. Elsewhere a wooded mass dissolves into the background and water is the only true mass; here the ravines are in the data, wide and continuous, and they make a figure on their own. Give them a frank value, clearly apart from the water, and take the lake deep enough that the arc of the islands stands out pale in front of it. Everything else can stay very quiet: the weave is vast and even, and any colour given to it would eat the only two shapes on the sheet.

The framing

Portrait, the lake along the bottom and the islands whole, channels included: cut them and they go back to being a shoreline. At the top, the limit is Highway 401; what lies beyond it no longer tells you anything and can leave. Come closer and downtown gains detail without gaining meaning, since no axis marks it out; pull back further and the ravines thin to veins. The setting sits between those two losses.

The caption

The title, one line under it, the coordinates. The name of a ravine, a station, the year you arrived: on a weave this even, the caption is what says where you are speaking from.

The sheet
Subject
Toronto, Canada
Palette
Ravin
Map style
Clean and Detailed
Layout
Split top
Typeface
Editorial
Framing
Zoom 10.6
Fade at the edges
0%
Format
Portrait
The palette of this poster

Ravin

Sixteen inks, in the configurator’s order. It is not in the catalogue, but you will find it in the palette library, filed under its material.

  • Background
  • Water
  • Greenery
  • Built-up areas
  • Roads
  • Buildings
  • Text
  • Motorways
  • Main roads
  • Secondary roads
  • Minor roads
  • Streets
  • Service roads
  • Paths
  • Railways
  • Borders
Compose with this paletteStart from it to make your own

Opens the colour workshop with these 16 inks in place: change one, keep the rest.

It will wait in your account, ready for any piece.

What the drawing tells

Three dates that explain the city

1793Ten blocks between four streets

Two years after Augustus Jones surveyed the shore and ran a base line, the street now called Queen, Lieutenant Governor Simcoe founded the town of York: ten blocks between Front, George, Adelaide and Berkeley, a rectangle you could cover with a thumb on this sheet. The city was incorporated as Toronto on 6 March 1834, from the Mohawk word tkaronto, which the City translates as the place where there are trees in the water.

1858A storm made the islands

A violent storm cut through the sand spit that closed the bay. The peninsula became an archipelago, and that is the form you see along the bottom of the sheet: a low arc, notched with channels, still holding the harbour shut without being attached to it any more. The map does not tell you an accident produced it; it shows only the result, which is why a print is worth the year written under it.

1954The valleys are empty because we chose it

Hurricane Hazel killed eighty-one people in the valleys. The region banned building there and bought the land. The ravines have remained the green corridors that cross the city ever since, a character owed in large part to those protections, as the City's ravine strategy puts it. What looks like an accident of terrain is a decision, and it is the only thing on this map that was won by refusing to build.

Before ordering

The four questions people ask

Can I choose any place, any date?

Yes. The search covers the whole world, from a capital to a hamlet. For the Sky collection, any date works, past or future: the sky is calculated.

What sizes do you offer?

From 21 × 29.7 cm to 84.1 × 118.9 cm, that is A4 to A0, portrait or landscape depending on the material. Every size is shown with its price in the editor.

What materials do you offer?

Four, from the barest to the most dressed.

  • Matte fine art paperA 200 gsm art paper with a deep matte finish: the bare print, to frame as you please.
  • Wooden hangersThe print suspended between two wooden hangers, ready to hang, in the spirit of studio posters.
  • The classic frameThe print mounted under acrylic glass in a slim frame, assembled by hand, delivered ready to hang.
  • Framed canvasThe piece printed on canvas, stretched over a wooden stretcher bar and set in a frame: a gallery presence.
How long does it take?

Allow 1 to 4 working days for making, up to 7 for hand-assembled frames and canvases, then 1 to 6 working days in transit with standard delivery.

Digital editions are available immediately: the file of your piece is emailed to you as soon as you order.

All the questions

Your Toronto

The ravine you walked down without leaving the city, the Sunday ferry, the street you always took back rather than another. The weave is the same for miles. The place where it opens for you is not.

Compose my Toronto poster